Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The mechanisms of learning stimulus-stimulus relationships are a longstanding research subject in psychology and neuroscience. Although traditional computational models provide valuable insights into learning processes, they often focus on the average behavior of a population. Individual learning trajectories, however, exhibit a diverse range of behaviors not captured by these models. In this paper, we compare sampling-based process-level models (i.e., particle filters) to representative associative and causal models (i.e., augmented Rescorla-Wagner and PowerPC) in their ability to capture individual learning behavior. We use likelihood-free inference incorporating machine-learned summary statistics for model estimation. We conduct a simulation study to demonstrate high model identifiability and test the models on an existing dataset and a newly conducted experiment which replicates and extends previous studies. We find that most participants are best explained by a particle filtering account, but more targeted experimental designs are required to estimate the best-fitting sub-type of these particle filter models.