My earlier work in this area examined group differences (young vs. old adults) in terms of tendency to adopt a particular strategy. The notion is that the cognitive resources that are required for more demanding memory retrievals are less available as one ages. The later papers explore this idea in more detail, examining individual differences in working memory resources. This work is the first attempt to fit individual performance at a fine grain, using only a single, pre-specified parameter to account for differences. In addition, the work describes our attempts to account for individual performance across tasks, using the same individual difference parameter. In other words, this work attempts to create zero parameter model fits of individual performance.


Schunn, C.D. & Reder, L.M. (2001). Another Source of Individual Differences: Strategy Adaptivity to Changing Rates of Success. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 59-76. [download PDF]

Schunn, C.D., Lovett, M.C., & Reder, L.M. (2001). Awareness and Working Memory in Strategy Adaptivity. Memory & Cognition, 29(2), 254-266. [download PDF]

Daily, L.Z., Lovett, M.C., & Reder, L.M. (2001). Modeling Individual Differences in Working Memory Performance: A Source Activation Account. Cognitive Science, 25, 315-353 [lead article]. [download PDF]

Lovett, M.C., Daily, L.Z., & Reder, L.M. (2000). A Source Activation Theory of Working Memory: Cross-task Prediction of Performance in ACT-R. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 99-118. Also available at: Elsevier [download PDF]

Lovett, M.C., Reder, L.M., & Lebiere, C. (1999). Modeling Working Memory in a Unified Architecture: An ACT-R Perspective. In Miyake, A. and Shah, P. (Eds). Models of Working Memory. Oxford University Press, pp.135-182. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M. & Schunn, C.D. (1999). Bringing Together the Psychometric and Strategy Worlds: Predicting Adaptivity in a Dynamic Task. In Gopher, D. & Koriat, A. (Eds). Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application. Attention and Performance XVII., MIT Press, pp.315-342. [download PDF]

Anderson, J.R., Lebiere, C., Lovett, M.C., & Reder, L.M. (1998). ACT-R: A higher-level account of processing capacity. (Commentary on Halford, Wilson & Phillips Processing capacity defined by relational complexity: Implications for comparative, developmental and cognitive psychology.) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, pp.831-832. [download PDF]

Schunn, C.D. & Reder, L.M. (1998). Strategy Adaptivity and Individual Differences. In D. L. Medin (Ed.) The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Academic Press, pp.115-154. [download PDF]

Best, B.J., Schunn, C.D., & Reder, L.M. (1998). Modeling Adaptivity in a Dynamic Task. In M.A. Gernsbacher & S. J. Derry (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, (p.144-159). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [download PDF]

Delaney, P., Reder, L.M., Staszewski, J., & Ritter, F. (1998). The Strategy Specific Nature of Improvement: The Power Law Applies by Strategy Within Task. Psychological Science, 9(1), 1-7. [lead article] [download PDF]

Lovett, M.C., Reder, L.M., & Lebiere, C. (1997). Modeling Individual Differences in a Digit Working Memory Task. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Cognitive Science Conference, pp.460-465. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [download PDF]

Anderson, J.R., Reder, L.M., & Lebiere, C. (1996). Working Memory: Activation limitations on retrieval. Cognitive Psychology, 30, 221-256.  [download PDF]

Schunn, C.D. & Reder, L.M. (1996). Modeling changes in strategy selections over time. Proceedings of the AAAI-96 Workshop on Computational Cognitive Modeling. Portland, Oregon, August 1996. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M., Wible, C., & Martin, J.(1986). Differential memory changes with age: Exact retrieval versus plausible inference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12(1), 72-81. [download PDF]
Note: Above paper was reprinted in L. Komatsu (1994), Experimenting with the mind: Readings in cognitive psychology, Brooks/Cole.