spreadr

The notion of spreading activation is a prevalent metaphor in the cognitive sciences. This package provides the tools for cognitive scientists and psychologists to conduct computer simulations that implement spreading activation in a network representation. The algorithmic method implemented in spreadr subroutines follows the approach described in Vitevitch, Ercal, and Adagarla (2011, Frontiers), who viewed activation as a fixed cognitive resource that could spread among nodes that were connected to each other via edges or connections (i.e., a network). See Vitevitch, M. S., Ercal, G., & Adagarla, B. (2011).

Installation

You can install the stable version via

> install.packages("spreadr")

or the latest version (on the GitHub master branch)

> remotes::install_github("csqsiew/spreadr")
> # alternatively
> # devtools::install_github("csqsiew/spreadr")

If you encounter which looks like

Error: (converted from warning) package 'Rcpp' was built under R version x.y.z

try setting Sys.setenv(R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS="true") first [1].

Development Notes

Testing the semantic priming simulation

By default, running the test suite will replicate most of the simulations in the article describing spreadr [2] except for the last, "Simulation Study 3: Semantic priming". That simulation requires 800 iterations each of taking a few minutes, making it impractical for testing.

However, there is an option to include the replication of the first iteration of that simulation, with retention = 0.8. Simply set the environment variable TEST_SEMANTIC_PRIMING to any non-empty string. For example, within an interactive R session:

> Sys.setenv(TEST_SEMANTIC_PRIMING="true")
> devtools::test()

Or, through R CMD:

$ cd ..
$ R CMD build spreadr
$ TEST_SEMANTIC_PRIMING=true R CMD check spreadr_x.y.z.tar.gz

replacing x.y.z with the version string.

Invalid ELF header

If you encounter an "invalid ELF header" error, as in

> devtools::load_all()
Loading spreadr
Error in dyn.load(dllfile) :
  unable to load shared object '/home/ning/github/spreadr/src/spreadr.so':
  /home/ning/github/spreadr/src/spreadr.so: invalid ELF header

Try calling devtools::clean_dll first [3].

[1]	https://github.com/r-lib/remotes/issues/403#issuecomment-748181946

[2]	https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1186-5

[3]	https://github.com/r-lib/devtools/issues/2027#issuecomment-483691800