Asking the right questions about the psychology of human inquiry: Nine open challenges

A Coenen, JD Nelson, TM Gureckis - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2019 - Springer
The ability to act on the world with the goal of gaining information is core to human
adaptability and intelligence. Perhaps the most successful and influential account of such …

Inferring causal networks from observations and interventions

M Steyvers, JB Tenenbaum… - Cognitive …, 2003 - Wiley Online Library
Abstract Information about the structure of a causal system can come in the form of
observational data—random samples of the system's autonomous behavior—or …

Finding useful questions: on Bayesian diagnosticity, probability, impact, and information gain.

JD Nelson - Psychological review, 2005 - psycnet.apa.org
Abstract [Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 114 (3) of
Psychological Review (see record 2007-10421-013). In Table 13, the data should indicate …

Faster teaching via pomdp planning

AN Rafferty, E Brunskill, TL Griffiths… - Cognitive …, 2016 - Wiley Online Library
Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize
student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has …

Sensitivity to sampling in Bayesian word learning

F Xu, JB Tenenbaum - Developmental science, 2007 - Wiley Online Library
We report a new study testing our proposal that word learning may be best explained as an
approximate form of Bayesian inference (Xu & Tenenbaum, in press). Children are capable …

Generalized information theory meets human cognition: Introducing a unified framework to model uncertainty and information search

V Crupi, JD Nelson, B Meder, G Cevolani… - Cognitive …, 2018 - Wiley Online Library
Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful
choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the …

Experience matters: Information acquisition optimizes probability gain

JD Nelson, CRM McKenzie, GW Cottrell… - Psychological …, 2010 - journals.sagepub.com
Deciding which piece of information to acquire or attend to is fundamental to perception,
categorization, medical diagnosis, and scientific inference. Four statistical theories of the …

Strategies to intervene on causal systems are adaptively selected

A Coenen, B Rehder, TM Gureckis - Cognitive psychology, 2015 - Elsevier
How do people choose interventions to learn about causal systems? Here, we considered
two possibilities. First, we test an information sampling model, information gain, which …

Asymptotic theory of information-theoretic experimental design

L Paninski - Neural Computation, 2005 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
We discuss an idea for collecting data in a relatively efficient manner. Our point of view is
Bayesian and information-theoretic: on any given trial, we want to adaptively choose the …

[HTML][HTML] Children's sequential information search is sensitive to environmental probabilities

JD Nelson, B Divjak, G Gudmundsdottir, LF Martignon… - Cognition, 2014 - Elsevier
We investigated 4th-grade children's search strategies on sequential search tasks in which
the goal is to identify an unknown target object by asking yes–no questions about its …