{"pk":28178,"title":"Humans aren’t enough:Providing access for simulated participants to behavioral experiment software","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Behavioral studies often warrant the inclusion of computa-tional participants in addition to humans. However, connect-ing computational cognitive or AI frameworks to GUI-basedsoftware developed for human use is extremely difficult. Thisresults in researchers either (1) diving into software code toappend an API for computational participants, (2) developingtwo separate versions of task code – one for human and one forcomputational participants, (3) cherry-picking research tasksthat already include both a GUI and an API, or (4) finding away to publish the research “as is” without the potentially use-ful results from running simulated participants on task. Theseemingly minor nuisance of the API-GUI dichotomy in to-day’s world of software development is, in fact, responsiblefor reduction in scientific progress. This work proposes afunctional-essence approach to software development, and theuse of STAP (Simple Task-Actor Protocol) as a standard UIinteraction language, for overcoming the API-GUI dichotomyand enabling access to the same software for both human andcomputational participants. We envision the adaptation of theproposed methodology to enable selection of off-the-shelf be-havioral tasks, decorative templates, and cognitive/AI frame-works for a more efficient path to research results.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"behavior research methods; simulations; cognitivemodeling; synthetic users; simulated humans; standards"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97v637sm","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vladislav","middle_name":"D","last_name":"Veksler","name_suffix":"","institution":"DCS copr, US Army Research Laboratory","department":""},{"first_name":"Norbou","middle_name":"","last_name":"Buchler","name_suffix":"","institution":"US Army Research Laboratory","department":""},{"first_name":"Christina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lebiere","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon","department":""},{"first_name":"Don","middle_name":"","last_name":"Morrison","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28178/galley/17837/download/"}]}