Resource management

While providing the control necessary to integrate the supertasks in order to produce proper reading behavior, the control supertask is also ensuring that the resources of the reader are properly managed, so that tasks will have the cognitive means necessary to perform their functions. Not every word of a story can be read to the greatest depth of comprehension possible--if readers were to attempt this, then they would exhaust their cognitive resources. The first task in resource management is interest management. This task is responsible for tracking the reader's level of interest in the story. An avid science fiction fan, for instance, would be more interested in Lycanthrope than a fan of Westerns. Unfortunately, there are very few theories of interest tracking. Some aspects to focus on, however, include recent events in the life of the reasoner, elements which are similar to aspects of the reasoner, events which are strongly connected to the reasoner, and so forth. Once a reasoner is aware of their level of interest in a particular story, it will become possible for the task of time management to occur. A reasoner has limited cognitive resources; time and memory are two of these. If a story is interesting, then a reader will be more likely to expend more time on it; similarly, uninteresting stories tend to be abandoned. Also, stories which are requiring too much expenditure of effort are likely to be abandoned.

Directly related to the last two tasks is focus of control. It is a rare situation that allows a reader to read each word of every sentence of a story in full depth. The more common way to approach a reading experience is to read some things in-depth, skim some sections, and to skip some areas completely. What determines the focus? The interest the reader has in the material and the cognitive resource load will determine at what level a text can be handled (for a discussion of similar ideas, see [#!meta:gavelik-raphael-1985!#,#!read:ram1!#,#!interest:schank-1979!#]). How is focus handled by the supertasks? control can request that sentence processing skip a sentence or phrase completely, or can request that the conceptual meaning built by that supertask is kept at a shallow level. This relates back to the earlier comment concerning resource allocation in the current system; although ISAAC could read each sentence in-depth for the short stories with which it deals, the focus is modeled at this level in order to see its effect on reading level. If predictions which ISAAC is making are accurate, then ISAAC can shift into a   skimming mode for portions of the text. If ISAAC discovers something surprising (i.e., something which is not predicted and not considered a standard result), then in-depth reading is triggered and the sentence can be re-read.