Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions

A Gopnik - … Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2020 - royalsocietypublishing.org
I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human
childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the …

Contextual inference in learning and memory

JB Heald, M Lengyel, DM Wolpert - Trends in cognitive sciences, 2023 - cell.com
Context is widely regarded as a major determinant of learning and memory across
numerous domains, including classical and instrumental conditioning, episodic memory …

Simulation intelligence: Towards a new generation of scientific methods

A Lavin, D Krakauer, H Zenil, J Gottschlich… - ar** in human cognition
B Zhao, CG Lucas, NR Bramley - Nature Human Behaviour, 2024 - nature.com
To tackle a hard problem, it is often wise to reuse and recombine existing knowledge. Such
an ability to bootstrap enables us to grow rich mental concepts despite limited cognitive …

Towards a rational constructivist theory of cognitive development.

F Xu - Psychological review, 2019 - psycnet.apa.org
This article provides a synthesis and overview of a theory of cognitive development, rational
constructivism. The basic tenets of this view are as follows:(a) Initial state: Human infants …

Generalization guides human exploration in vast decision spaces

CM Wu, E Schulz, M Speekenbrink, JD Nelson… - Nature human …, 2018 - nature.com
From foraging for food to learning complex games, many aspects of human behaviour can
be framed as a search problem with a vast space of possible actions. Under finite search …

Developmental changes in exploration resemble stochastic optimization

AP Giron, S Ciranka, E Schulz, W van den Bos… - Nature Human …, 2023 - nature.com
Human development is often described as a 'cooling off'process, analogous to stochastic
optimization algorithms that implement a gradual reduction in randomness over time. Yet …