The cognitive modeling of human behavior: Why a model is (sometimes) better than 10, 000 words

This special issue of Cognitive Systems Research presents a collection of remarkable papers on cognitive modeling based on communications delivered at ICCM-2006, the Seventh International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (Fum, Del Missier, & Stocco, 2006) held in Trieste, Italy, from April 5th to 8th, 2006. Being the organizers and chairmen of the conference, we have been invited to serve as guest editors for this issue. We therefore solicited some participants to reexamine their contributions, and to change them in form of journal articles. In particular, we asked authors to review what they had presented during the conference focusing on the benefits cognitive modeling could provide to cognitive science. The issue you are reading is the result of this editorial process. In this introductory commentary we would like to set the stage for what follows by illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of cognitive modeling, and by presenting a minimal set of requirements for a good modeling practice. Then, we will briefly preview the papers composing this special issue, and we will emphasize how they deal with the issues discussed in the previous sections.