Better Behavioral Prediction, More Faithful Model Ablations? Evidence from Sequential Choice

Using predictive models to explain cognition requires more than accurate behavioral predictions. Input ablations offer an appealing route: remove information from a model and interpret the resulting performance change as evidence of its importance for behavior. Yet this inference assumes that the model's dependence on information reflects the dependence of the process generating the behavior. We test it in two synthetic sequential bandit tasks with known generating policies, where past choices can remain informative when feedback is unavailable to a predictor. We compare GRUs and Transformers trained from scratch, a fine-tuned LLaMA model, and cognitive models across systematically varied...

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