A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition

This scientific paper introduces Centaur, a novel computational model designed to predict and simulate human behavior across a wide range of cognitive tasks. The researchers created Centaur by fine-tuning a powerful language model (Llama 3.1 70B) on Psych-101, an unprecedentedly large dataset comprising over 10 million human choices from 160 psychological experiments. The study demonstrates Centaur's superior ability to generalize to unseen participants, modified task structures, and entirely new cognitive domains, outperforming existing specialized cognitive models. Furthermore, Centaur's internal representations showed increased alignment with human neural activity, suggesting its potential for guiding the development of unified cognitive theories and enabling new avenues for model-guided scientific discovery.