An Overview of the EPIC Architecture for Cognition and Performance With Application to Human-Computer Interaction
EPIC (Executive Process-Interactive Control) is a cognitive architecture especially suited for modeling human multimodal and multiple-task performance. The EPIC architecture includes peripheral sensory-motor processors surrounding a production-rule cognitive processor, and is being used to construct precise computational models for a variety of HCI situations. Some of these models are briefly illustrated here to demonstrate how EPIC clarifies basic properties of human performance and provides usefully precise accounts of performance speed and accuracy. INTRODUCTION This paper provides an overview of the EPIC (Executive Process-Interactive Control) architecture being developed by Kieras and Meyer for modeling human cognition and performance (Meyer & Kieras, in press-a, b, 1995; Kieras, Wood, & Meyer, 1995a,b; Kieras & Meyer, 1995). EPIC is similar in spirit to the Model Human Processor (MHP) (Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983), but EPIC incorporates many recent theoretical and empirical resul...