METHODS article

Front. Epidemiol.

Sec. Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fepid.2025.1532553

This article is part of the Research TopicModelling the Impact of Human Behaviour on Infectious Disease EpidemiologyView all 5 articles

Prediction of U.S. Daily Mask Wearing and Social Distancing using Psychologically Valid Agents During Three Waves of COVID-19

Provisionally accepted
Choh Man TengChoh Man Teng1*Peter PirolliPeter Pirolli1Archna BhatiaArchna Bhatia1Kathleen CarleyKathleen Carley2Bonnie DorrBonnie Dorr3Christian LebiereChristian Lebiere2Brodie MatherBrodie Mather1Konstantinos MitsopoulosKonstantinos Mitsopoulos1Don MorrisonDon Morrison2Mark OrrMark Orr1Tomek StrzalkowskiTomek Strzalkowski4
  • 1Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Florida, United States
  • 2Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
  • 3University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States
  • 4Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, United States

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We present Regional Psychologically Valid Agents (R-PVAs) as a modeling approach to predicting transmission-reducing behaviors and epidemiology. The approach builds upon computational cognitive theory and formalizes aspects of theories of individual-level behavior change. We present R-PVA models of social distancing and mask wearing in response to dynamics in the physical and information environments in the 50 U.S. states. The models achieve strong goodness-of-fits for predicting day-to-day mask-wearing (R 2 = 0.93) and social distancing (R 2 = 0.62) for the first three waves of COVID-19, prior to the rollout of vaccines.

Keywords: cognitive model, COVID-19, Decision Making, Behavior, ACT-R

Received: 22 Nov 2024; Accepted: 22 Apr 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Teng, Pirolli, Bhatia, Carley, Dorr, Lebiere, Mather, Mitsopoulos, Morrison, Orr and Strzalkowski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Choh Man Teng, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Florida, United States

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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