To better understand the mysteries of human cognition, scientists at the Kempner Institute are turning to a powerful new ally: artificial intelligence. Kempner Research Fellow Wilka Carvalho and his collaborators have developed an ambitious framework for using AI to broaden the scope of cognitive science, offering researchers new tools and methodologies to study how people think and make decisions in realistic contexts.
Carvalho and his collaborators recently published a series of three papers presenting this framework. The first lays out a broad theoretical case for what they call “naturalistic computational cognitive science.” The second introduces a software tool, NiceWebRL, that helps cognitive scientists design and analyze experiments in increasingly realistic online environments. The third uses NiceWebRL to test Carvalho’s new theory of how humans generalize to new goals in large worlds with many possible goals and objects.
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