An Analysis of ACT-R and CLARION Representing Heuristic Strategies for Consumer Decision-Making

A Systematic Literature Review

Bachelor Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

W.J.P.L. van de Sanden (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

Bernd Dudzik – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

Chenxu Hao – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

Catherine Oertel – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Graduation Date
25-06-2025
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Project
['CSE3000 Research Project']
Programme
['Computer Science and Engineering']
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
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Abstract

Heuristic strategies are an integral part of consumer decision-making. Heuristics serve as mental shortcuts that reduce cognitive effort, simplifying consumer decisions. To go from qualitative insights into these heuristics to quantitative data, a cognitive architecture must represent these heuristic strategies to understand consumer behavior better. This study will focus on the cognitive architectures ACT-R and CLARION since there is an interesting distinction in how they structure symbolic (explicit) and subsymbolic (implicit) cognition, influencing how they represent heuristic behavior. Currently, there is no systematic overview and comparison of how ACT-R and CLARION represent heuristics relevant to consumer decision-making. This paper aims to fill this knowledge gap by performing a systematic literature review on papers that contain an ACT-R or CLARION representation of heuristics relevant to consumer decision-making. The review uses four databases for the literature search: Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. In total, 58 records have been screened, and 12 records have been included in the review. The review shows that ACT-R’s strength relies on representing heuristics by sequentially executing rule-based heuristics, while CLARION focuses on representing similarity- based heuristics by using bottom-up activation from its implicit layers. The results show a pattern in which the architectural structure mainly determines which heuristic strategies have been represented.

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