Reddit mentions of Computational Modeling in Cognition: Principles and Practice

By generalizations I meant the Bayesian driver model can handel certain novel situations that are not too different from the scenario used to have the actual subjects drive in. But what they also did was taking it apart and using only the motor components to have another, rule based driver model take over.

"Model" is a loaded word, that's for sure. In cognitive science we mean this: It is a theory, or could be even a hypothesis. We'd absolutely count statistical models as models: A mean is an abstraction of a set of data. It is a simplification to describe something more difficult. That's the idea of models: Simplifying, abstracting, getting at what's important. You don't want your model to be so complex that you'd need another model to understand it.

There are several conceptions of models, the one I like most currently stems from "Computational Modeling in Cognition": It can be purely data descriptive without any psychological content, it can characterize a psychological process, or even explain it. What that means exactly takes a bit to understand. If you are interested I recommend reading that book. It contains a lot of programming examples, teaching you the necessary tools to model. If you want to know why psychology, after all, is essential to the understanding of the human mind, David Marr's 3 level hypothesis gives you and idea.

But again, models are theories of something, and they are done in order to do something with them. They are only means to understand cognition better, but they are, in my mind, the best means we have. Predictions in that sense mean that you have equations or computer models that tell you what in a certain situation will happen, what kind of output both the model and humans will generate. That can be anything: A certain decision, a certain reaction to a psychophysical stimulus, in the long run it could be the reaction to a clincial treatment. Our personae are not "immune" to modelling, neither are emotions. But that being not my area of expertise, I don't know about the state of the art.

Also check out this book. I have always thought it would be neat to model cognitive processes in Simulink:

Computational Modeling in Cognition: Principles and Practice https://www.amazon.com/dp/1412970768/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_E16DAbQ75NY39