Formalization of Psychological Knowledge in Answer Set Programming and its Application

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Answer Set Programming can formalize psychological concepts, specifically short-term memory, enabling better reasoning and practical applications like predicting user interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ASP-based formalization of psychological knowledge, particularly short-term memory, facilitating reasoning and practical interface predictions.

Findings

ASP effectively formalizes psychological concepts.

The formalization enables accurate predictions of user interactions.

Practical applications in interface design are demonstrated.

Abstract

In this paper we explore the use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to formalize, and reason about, psychological knowledge. In the field of psychology, a considerable amount of knowledge is still expressed using only natural language. This lack of a formalization complicates accurate studies, comparisons, and verification of theories. We believe that ASP, a knowledge representation formalism allowing for concise and simple representation of defaults, uncertainty, and evolving domains, can be used successfully for the formalization of psychological knowledge. To demonstrate the viability of ASP for this task, in this paper we develop an ASP-based formalization of the mechanics of Short-Term Memory. We also show that our approach can have rather immediate practical uses by demonstrating an application of our formalization to the task of predicting a user's interaction with a graphical interface.