Centaur is an AI model of human cognition that was trained on a curated dataset called Psych-101, which included data from 60,000 people who made more than 10 million individual choices over 160 psychology experiments, according to the paper. The researchers say it might be the world's largest human behavior dataset.
"Essentially, we show the model a full transcript of a psychological experiment from a participant — everything they were told, have seen and have done," study lead author
Marcel Binz, a research scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
The team then let the model predict what experiment participants chose in specific contexts. If the model predicted a choice that a person didn't make in real life, the researchers would fine-tune the model by correcting its choice. They repeated this process over and over, until Centaur was regularly making correct predictions.
Their next goal is to use Centaur as a proxy for the
human brain to determine whether certain patterns they see in the program's data processing correlate with specific decisions. This information could help answer questions about how people process information and how decision-making differs between those with and without mental health conditions, for example, according to the statement.
"Right now, we essentially have a big black box model that predicts human behavior really well," Binz told Live Science. Thanks to Centaur, the researchers can now predict how humans will act, but don't yet have insight into how they arrive at a given decision.
Currently, one big unknown is whether Centaur just predicts human thought or whether it reproduces the underlying cognitive processes, Lake explained. "Is it modeling human mental processes, or just mimicking the outcomes?"
