Evaluating Cognitive Models and Architectures

Cognitive modeling is a promising research area combining the fields of psychology and artificial intelligence. Cognitive models have been successfully applied to different topics like theory generation in psychology, usability testing in humancomputer interface research, and cognitive tutoring in algebra teaching. This paper is focused on two major problems concerning the evaluation of cognitive models and architectures. First, it is shown that current approaches to quantify model complexity are not sufficient and second, the claim is reinforced that the flexibility of cognitive architectures leads to the problem that they cannot be falsified and are therefore too weak to be considered as theories. Cognitive architectures From a psychologist’s point of view, the main goal of cognitive modeling is to simulate human cognition. A cognitive model is seen as an instantiation of a theory in a computational form. This can then be used to test a certain theory empirically. Cognitive architectures like SOAR (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom 1987), EPIC (Kieras & Meyer 1997), and ACTR (Anderson et al. 2004) are useful frameworks for the creation of cognitive models. In addition, they are often regarded as useful steps towards a unified theory of cognition (Newell 1990). When a computational model is used to evaluate a theory, the main goal is (generalizable) concordance with human data. But this is not a sufficient proof of the theory. The following problems are often stated in the literature: • Compliance with the theory. The underlying theory and its implementation (in a cognitive architecture) may diverge. • Irrelevant specification (Reitman 1965). Most of the models need to make additional assumptions. It is very hard to tell which parts of the model are responsible for its overall performance and which parts may be obsolete. Newell (1990) demanded to “listen to the architecture” when creating new models in order to get around this Copyright c © 2007, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. problem. While this is a recommendable request, it is hard to verify that the modeler has complied with it. • Underlying theories. A special case of the irrelevant specification problem can occur when the architecture incorporates knowledge from previous research, for example Fitts’ law (Fitts 1954) about the time needed to perform a rapid movement of the forearm. These underlying empirical laws may provide a big part of the fit of the cognitive model in question. • Interpretability. Most of the time, one needs to look at the code of a model in order to understand what it really does. As many psychologists do not hold a degree in computer science, this hinders them from participating in the cognitive modeling research field. The usage of a cognitive architecture – as opposed to modeling everything from scratch – does not solve these problems completely, but weakens them noticeably. Cognitive architectures are subject to social control by the research community. This way, theory compliance, interpretability, and rejection of irrelevant parts are enforced at least on the level of the architecture. An informative evaluation of cognitive models has been done by Gluck & Pew (2005). They applied several cognitive architectures to the same task and compared the resulting models not only with regard to goodness-of-fit but also to modeling methodology, features and implied assumptions of the particular architecture, and the role of parameter tuning during the modeling process. This approach of Gluck & Pew is well suited for addressing the problems of model evaluation besides goodness-offit and therefore I’ll recommend it as standard practice. Evaluation methodology for cognitive models I stated above that from a psychologist’s point of view concordance with human data is the main goal of cognitive modeling. This concordance is typically assessed by computing goodness-of-fit indices. This approach has been critized sharply during the last years (Roberts & Pashler 2000), initiating a discussion that concluded with the joint statement that a good fit is necessary, but not sufficient for the validity of a model (Rodgers & Rowe 2002; Roberts & Pashler 2002).