A Preliminary Model of Expert Programming,
Abstract:
Expert programming involves the manipulation of large amounts of memory, including extemal memory represented on a display, semantic memory for expert knowledge, and episodic memory about what has transpired during a particular programming session. We present a computational cognitive model that emulates several minutes of expert, naturalistic programming behavior. The model has three high-level components Knowledge, an underlying cognitive architecture, and mechanisms that allow the architecture to manipulate the knowledge. To illustrate these components we trace the model on two related episodes of behavior. In the first episode, the programmer acquires information from the display. Then, in the second episode, she recalls something and scrolls through previous screens until she reaches the display from the first episode. Emulating this behavior requires the interaction of external, expert, and episodic knowledge, the encoding of episodic knowledge as carried out by the architecture, and mechanisms for selecting goals, attending to the display, and probing long-term memory.