Developing And Calibrating An ABM Of The Property Listing Task

Abstract

We present an Agent Based Model (ABM), which shows how subjects may perform the Property Listing Task (PLT), which is widely used across psychology. In the PLT, subjects list properties that describe concepts in their minds. This ABM views the PLT as a communicative process, by which agents list properties for a concept, so that they can achieve a given level of agreement among them, i.e. produce properties that are more or less the same among agents. Using Conceptual Agreement Theory (CAT), we model that agreement in the ABM and are able to derive functional forms that the ABM's outputs should follow. The results show that agents produce agreement curves that indeed match the stated functional forms and also reasonably follow the corresponding curves obtained from empirical data. Thus, the ABM can now be used to better understand the PLT and also be further developed to model how subjects may stop listing properties for a concept according to some criteria based on the achieved level of agreement.