Evaluating Hank, a Cognitive Modelling Language for Psychologists

Hank is a visual cognitive modelling language that was devised by Paul Mulholland and Stuart Watt at The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute and rst presented at last year's PPIG [Mulholland and Watt, 1998]. The design of Hank was fueled by the experiences Mulholland and Watt gained through teaching Open University (\OU") psychology students how to build cognitive models using the Prolog programming language as well as from their work on source-level steppers [Watt, 1994] and tracing tools [Mulholland, 1995]. In order to produce a suitable cognitive modelling language for OU psychology students, Mulholland and Watt identi ed four essential user requirements;