Generative Behaviors as Key Targets for Cognitive Models

Human behavior is fundamentally generative: People create pictures, write stories, compose music, and engage in conversation. Traditional approaches in psychology and cognitive science have not focused on this open-endedness, instead favoring more constrained task settings that admit a limited set of outcomes. Although those approaches have been fruitful, new approaches might be needed to develop a unified understanding of the generative, open-ended behaviors that are so emblematic of human cognition. This article demonstrates the value of generative behaviors as targets for cognitive modeling by providing rich behavioral data that reveal how multiple cognitive processes coordinate. Drawing production serves as a case study illustrating this approach, showing how perception, memory, social inference, and motor control coordinate flexibly on the basis of communicative context. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence offer both new tools for modeling open-ended human behavior and new comparative targets for understanding similarities and differences between human and machine intelligence. However, applying these tools effectively might require new experimental paradigms, larger data sets, and careful consideration of what mechanistic correspondence between models and human cognition is necessary for scientific progress. Embracing the open-ended nature of human thought and behavior poses methodological challenges but offers a promising path toward understanding the most distinctive aspects of human intelligence.