Adaptive Planning is an approach to planning in the commonsense domain. An adaptive planner takes advantage of the habitual nature of many of the planning situations for which it plans by bosing its activities on a memory of pre‐stored plans. A critical issue, and the subject of this paper, is the question of flexibility: How does an adaptive planner refit an old plan in order to meet the demands of some new planning situation? An adaptive planner refits prestored plans by (...) constructing an interpretation of the situation in which it is engaged. Key elements in the theory of adaptive planning are its treatment of specific plans and a notion of situation matching. The theory of adaptive planning has been modeled by a computer program called PLEXUS. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of two features of the everyday task environment. First, the everyday task environment is designed, and an important part of the design is the provision of explicit information to guide the individual in the adaptation of his activity. Second, some task environments are semi‐permanent. These two features of the task environment reveal some important characteristics in the psychology of the individual. When novelty occurs, expansion in the range of behavior of the individual is guided (...) by a process of internalization of information provided in the task environment by another. Because of the semi‐permanence of home task environments, there is pay‐off in organizing behavior in terms of the particulars of those environments. The body of this paper examines these ideas from the perspective of FLOABN. FLOABN is a computational cognitive model of an individual acquiring skill at using household and office devices. (shrink)