A small cognitive core explains human behavior at scale
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...
| Authors | Marcel Binz, Eric Schulz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 October 2026 |
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