CaDaDis: A Tool for Displaying the Behavior of Cognitive Models and Agents

We introduce an extension to an architecture-independent tool (VISTA) for creating displays of cognitive model behavior, the Categorical Data Display (CaDaDis). Our display offers several views of categorical data. It includes a standard Pert Chart showing tasks by category (or resource), a Nonstandard Pert Chart that shows the temporal dependencies, and a Gantt chart that helps show occurrences of agent events along a time line. Perhaps most usefully, it can display categorical and numeric data generated by models as they run. CaDaDis can be used by different cognitive architectures because it has a general interface and creates its displays based on structured messages across a network socket. Its use is illustrated with three, domain-distinct Soar and ACT-R models.