Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We study game theoretic decision making using a bidirectional evidence accumulation model. Our model represents both preferences for the strategies available to the decision maker, as well as beliefs regarding the opponent’s choices. Through sequential sampling and accumulation, the model is able to intelligently reason through two-player strategic games, while also generating specific violations of Nash equilibrium typically observed in these games. The main ingredients of accumulator models, stochastic sampling and dynamic accumulation, play a critical role in explaining these behavioral patterns as well as generating novel predictions.