Game Theory -based decision aids have been successfully em-ployed in real-world policing, anti-terrorism, and wildlife con-servation efforts (Tambe, Jiang, An, & Jain, 2013). Cognitivemodeling, in concert with model tracing and dynamic parame-ter fitting techniques, may be used to improve the performanceof such decision aids by predicting individual attacker behav-ior in repeated security games. We present three simulations,showing that (1) cognitive modeling can aid in greatly improv-ing decision-aid performance in the security domain; and (2)despite the fact that individual attackers will differ in initialpreferences and in how they learn, model parameters can beadjusted dynamically to make useful predictions for each at-tacker.

Behavioral studies often warrant the inclusion of computa-tional participants in addition to humans. However, connect-ing computational cognitive or AI frameworks to GUI-basedsoftware developed for human use is extremely difficult. Thisresults in researchers either (1) diving into software code toappend an API for computational participants, (2) developingtwo separate versions of task code – one for human and one forcomputational participants, (3) cherry-picking research tasksthat already include both a GUI and an API, or (4) finding away to publish the research “as is” without the potentially use-ful results from running simulated participants on task. Theseemingly minor nuisance of the API-GUI dichotomy in to-day’s world of software development is, in fact, responsiblefor reduction in scientific progress. This work proposes afunctional-essence approach to software development, and theuse of STAP (Simple Task-Actor Protocol) as a standard UIinteraction language, for overcoming the API-GUI dichotomyand enabling access to the same software for both human andcomputational participants. We envision the adaptation of theproposed methodology to enable selection of off-the-shelf be-havioral tasks, decorative templates, and cognitive/AI frame-works for a more efficient path to research results.