Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose a biologically constrained, large-scale neural network model that solves the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST has been widely used in clinical and research settings to study cognitive flexibility and executive function. The model shows a good quantitative match with human responses across a number of WCST scoring indices, while consisting of neural networks that functionally and anatomically map to brain areas and structures implicated in the task, such as the prefrontal cortex and the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamus-cortical loop. We argue that the model provides a mechanistic account of WCST solving, and demonstrate its robustness by examining its performance across a range of biologically motivated parameter values.