Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Information Seeking, Curiosity and Attention (Neurocuriosity 2016)

Curiosity in humans and animals
#21

Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University, US
How Core Knowledge Drives Learning

Abstract: Across species and across human development, core knowledge empowers expectations about the physical and social world. Many non-human creatures—as well as very young human infants—exhibit knowledge about how objects should behave, how quantities should transform, and how social agents should act. This core knowledge has often been thought of as an alternative to learning. In contrast to this “static knowledge” view, I will describe recent findings from infants and children that show that core knowledge shapes the acquisition of new information. Across a range of learning content and tasks, babies and children show enhanced learning for entities that violated their basic expectations, and test hypotheses for these violations. These findings suggest that foundational knowledge shapes new learning.

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#22

[Daphne Bavelier, University of Geneva, Switzerland and University of Rochester, US] (https://cms.unige.ch/fapse/people/bavelier/)
Learning to Learn: Lessons from Action Video Game Play

Abstract: A vexing issue in the field of learning is that, while we understand how to promote superior performance through practice, the resulting behavioral enhancement rarely extends beyond the practiced task. Such learning specificity is a major limitation for effective interventions, whether educational or clinical ones. Here we will consider first how learning and generalization may be enhanced, through a mechanism we term ‘learning to learn’ (L2L). We then ask what may be the determinants of ‘learning to learn’ – differentiating between adjusting parameters as learning of a specific task proceeds from extracting the structure across tasks to facilitate learning and generalization.

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#23

Alison Gopnik, UC Berkeley, US
When (and why) children are more open-minded than adults: Childhood as simulated annealing

Abstract: I will present several studies showing that preschoolers can learn abstract higher-order principles from data. In each case, younger learners were actually better at inferring unusual or unlikely principles than older learners. I relate this to computational ideas about search and sampling, to evolutionary ideas about human life history, and to neuroscience findings about the negative effects of frontal control on wide exploration, and the advantages of earlier neural architectures for wide-ranging learning. Our hypothesis is that childhood is evolution’s way of performing simulated annealing. Our distinctively long human childhood allows a period of broad exploratory “high-temperature” hypothesis search.

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#24

Teodora Gliga, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Day 3 General Discussion: Developmental Psychology

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#25

Day 2 Discussion: Computational theories of curiosity and active exploration in animals and machines

Slides: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ps41i5hgyyz88wk/discussionNeurocuriosityOudeyer16.pdf?dl=0