Abstract

Chapter 3 introduces the use of mathematical models and modeling practices in contemporary biological and cognitive sciences. The familiar Lotka–Volterra model of predator–prey relations is used to explain these practices and show how they promote the extensions of predicates, including psychological predicates, into new and often unexpected domains. It presents two models of cognitive capacities that were developed to explain human behavioral data: Ratcliff’s drift-diffusion model of decision-making and Sutton and Barto’s temporal difference model of reinforcement learning. These are now used for fruit flies and neural populations. It also discusses contemporary and ongoing attempts to revise psychological concepts in response to empirical discovery.