Modelling human logical reasoning process in dynamic environmental stress with cognitive agents (2301.06216v3)

Abstract: Modelling human cognition can provide key insights into behavioral dynamics under changing conditions. This enables synthetic data generation and guides adaptive interventions for cognitive regulation. Challenges arise when environments are highly dynamic, obscuring stimulus-behavior relationships. We propose a cognitive agent integrating drift-diffusion with deep reinforcement learning to simulate granular stress effects on logical reasoning process. Leveraging a large dataset of 21,157 logical responses, we investigate performance impacts of dynamic stress. This prior knowledge informed model design and evaluation. Quantitatively, the framework improves cognition modelling by capturing both subject-specific and stimuli-specific behavioural differences. Qualitatively, it captures general trends in human logical reasoning under stress. Our approach is extensible to examining diverse environmental influences on cognition and behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates a powerful, data-driven methodology to simulate and understand the vagaries of human logical reasoning process in dynamic contexts.