Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One particularly successful approach to modeling withincognitive science is computational psychology.Computational psychology explores psychological processesby building and testing computational models with humandata. In this paper, it is argued that a specific approach tounderstanding computation, what is called the ‘narrowconception’, has problematically limited the kinds of models,theories, and explanations that are offered withincomputational psychology. After raising two problems for thenarrow conception, an alternative, ‘wide approach’ tocomputational psychology is proposed.