Do Humans Navigate via Random Walks? Modeling Navigation in a Semantic Word Game.

Abstract

We investigate a method for formulating context and taskspecific computational models of human performance in a constrained semantic memory task. In particular, we assume that memory retrieval can only use a simple process – a random walk – and examine whether the effect of context and task specifications can be captured via a straightforward network estimation method that is sensitive to context and task. We find that a random walk model on the context-specific networks mimics aggregate human performance.