{"pk":49457,"title":"Linking Strategies to Think Aloud in A Stochastic Learning Task","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Understanding human thoughts is a key goal of cognitive science. Behavioral observations alone limit insight into cognition. The think-aloud protocol, where participants verbalize thoughts, offers a direct probe into reasoning but is underutilized due to challenges in subjectivity and scalability. Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) enable computational analysis of think-aloud data, yet little work explores its role in strategy learning. We test whether think-aloud reports reveal strategy use in a stochastic learning task where participants verbalized their strategies. Our results show diverse strategy usage, with a preference for persistent choices. Think-aloud analysis suggests participants rely on distinct meta-strategies to guide learning. Clustering and predictive modeling reveal strong alignment between choices and verbalized strategies. These findings highlight think-aloud as a scalable tool with NLP techniques for studying high-level cognition, shedding light on a promising paradigm for cognitive sciences.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Decision making; Language and thought; Learning; Reasoning; Computational Modeling; Verbal protocol studies"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sb936m3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Zhenlong","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhang","name_suffix":"","institution":"John Hopkins University","department":""},{"first_name":"Hanbo","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xie","name_suffix":"","institution":"Georgia Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Travis","middle_name":"E","last_name":"Baker","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""},{"first_name":"Megan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Peters","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California Irvine","department":""},{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wilson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Georgia Tech","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49457/galley/37419/download/"}]}