A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition

When the idea of a unified model of cognition was first proposed, researchers expressed concern that established areas of cognitive science might react negatively to such a model. In particular, they feared that the approach might be seen as unfamiliar or incompatible with existing theories, just like an “intruder with improper pheromones”. This could lead to an “attack of the killer bees”, in which researchers in more-conventional fields would fiercely critique or reject the new model to defend their established approaches. To mitigate these concerns, the concept of a cognitive decathlon was proposed: a rigorous evaluation framework in which competing models of cognition are tested across ten experiments and judged on their cumulative performance in them. In the current work, we applied Centaur to the equivalent of 16 such cognitive decathlons, in which it was tested against numerous established models and consistently won every competition. This outcome indicates that the data-driven discovery of domain-general models of cognition is a promising research direction. The next step for future research should be to translate this domain-general computational model into a unified theory of human cognition.