Binz, M., Akata, E., et al. (2025).
Nature.
Abstract
Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been an important goal in psychology. A first step towards such a theory is to create a computational model that can predict human behaviour in a wide range of settings. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behaviour in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by fine-tuning a state-of-the-art language model on a large-scale dataset called Psych-101. Psych-101 has an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from more than 60,000 participants performing in excess of 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behaviour of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but it also generalizes to previously unseen cover stories, structural task modifications and entirely new domains. Furthermore, the model’s internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after fine-tuning. Taken together, our results demonstrate that it is possible to discover computational models that capture human behaviour across a wide range of domains. We believe that such models provide tremendous potential for guiding the development of cognitive theories, and we present a case study to demonstrate this.
Here are some thoughts:
This article is important because it introduces Centaur, a novel computational model that represents a major step toward a unified theory of cognition. By fine-tuning a large language model on a vast dataset of human behavior, the researchers created a model with superior predictive power that can generalize across different cognitive domains. This model not only outperforms existing, specialized cognitive models but also demonstrates an alignment with human neural activity, suggesting it captures fundamental principles of human thought. Ultimately, the paper proposes that Centaur can serve as a powerful tool for scientific discovery, guiding the development and refinement of new psychological theories.
