Prediction of U.S. daily mask wearing and social distancing using psychologically valid agents during three waves of COVID-19
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 (<i>R</i> <sup>2</sup> = 0.93) and social distancing (<i>R</i> <sup>2</sup> = 0.62) for the first three waves of COVID-19, prior to the rollout of vaccines.
Authors
- Konstantinos Mitsopoulos (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0076-2334)
- Bonnie J. Dorr (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4356-5813)
- Peter Pirolli (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-4880)
- Mark T. Orr (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2684-4722)
- Don Morrison
- Tomek Strzalkowski (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4206-3985)
- Christian Lebière (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4865-3062)
- Brodie Mather (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5074-0259)
- Kathleen M. Carley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6356-0238)
- Choh Man Teng
- Archna Bhatia
Institutions
- Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (US)
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (US)
- University of Florida (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Frontiers in Epidemiology
- Published
- 2025-05-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fepid.2025.1532553
- Primary Topic
- Infection Control and Ventilation
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation