A small cognitive core explains human behavior at scale
Organizations: Institute for Human-Centered AI, Helmholtz Munich, Neuherberg, Germany · Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
Abstract
Psychology has proposed many principles of cognition. Each, however, was developed in isolation, leaving their combined explanatory power unknown. We assembled a small set of established principles into one model, which we call COntextual Retrieval and Encoding (CORE). CORE consists of a hierarchy of episodic memories into which prediction errors are written and whose encoding, retrieval, and forgetting depend on context. Fitted jointly to 7,036,442 choices from 137 experiments, the model predicts human choices better than black-box models and reproduces 75% of reported behavioral effects when simulated. Moreover, its latent variables show classic signatures of Bayesian learning and event segmentation. Taken together, these findings suggest that a small cognitive core accounts for much of human behavior. They also open a path toward making psychology more than the sum of its parts, by building computational models on the entire experimental record.
Figures & tables
| Domain | Reproduced | Experiment | Not reproduced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exploration | 11/11 (100%) | — | — |
| Reinforcement learning | 10/11 (91%) | chambon_2020_information [ 27 ] | Counterfactual feedback improves performance in a two-armed bandit. |
| Risky and intertemporal choice | 9/13 (69%) | olschewski_2024_frequent [ 28 ] | Preference for the more frequent winner in a sampling task with equal-value options. |
| olschewski_2024_frequent [ 28 ] | Preference for the more frequent winner in a sampling task with identical outcome distributions. | ||
| olschewski_2024_frequent [ 28 ] | Preference for the right-skewed option in a sampling task without a frequent winner. | ||
| spektor_2024_absolute [ 29 ] | Fewer risky choices in a loss-averse than in a gain-seeking context. |
Cognitive Modeling
Cognitive modeling uses computational theories to explain and predict how people perceive, learn, remember, reason, and decide.
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