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Jan Drugowitsch

 

 

 

(Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS))

 

Wednesday 13th June 2012

16.00

 

B10 Seminar Room, Basement,

Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

 

 

 

Bounding human cognitive capacity in task set learning and switching

 

Learning task sets and switching between them is ubiquitous in everyday behaviour. Despite this, little is known about how efficient humans are in their use of information when performing either learning or switching. Previous task set switching models eithers contained heuristic components, or were unable to reproduce important features in human behaviour. We address task set learning and switching from the ideal observer/actor perspective and show that humans perform within 11% of the optimal model performance.
Inference leading to optimal behaviour is intractable if memory resources are limited. Thus, we introduce model variants that implement memory constraints on some parts of the inference process.
Comparing performance of the constraint model to human behaviour allows us to lower-bound the effective memory requirements to feature human-like performance, as such putting a bound on human cognitive capacity.

 

http://www.lnc.ens.fr/~jdrugowi/