AUTHOR=Teng Choh Man , Pirolli Peter , Bhatia Archna , Carley Kathleen , Dorr Bonnie , Lebiere Christian , Mather Brodie , Mitsopoulos Konstantinos , Morrison Don , Orr Mark , Strzalkowski Tomek 

TITLE=Prediction of U.S. daily mask wearing and social distancing using psychologically valid agents during three waves of COVID-19

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Epidemiology

VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/epidemiology/articles/10.3389/fepid.2025.1532553

DOI=10.3389/fepid.2025.1532553

ISSN=2674-1199

ABSTRACT=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 (R2 = 0.93) and social distancing (R2 = 0.62) for the first three waves of COVID-19, prior to the rollout of vaccines.