Interesting Wired article on clickbait with some neuroscience on its effectiveness even with obvious bait.
I’m only encountering this now as I’m bored in Edmonton and using Facebook – ordinarily I don’t! Perhaps this is old news for you…
It’s All About Flow
(By Jen Schellinck)
Some tidbits from this week’s lab round-table:
- Representations and truth value – how many definitions can we find? Can we get away without representations? Can philosophy help us by teasing apart many competing definitions of this word?
- Musical cognition: A fascinating topic! Music is one of the few human universals. And even some non-human species are happy to bop along to a tune (although not all have a decent sense of rhythm). But what role does music really play in cognition? Is it important? Is it a side-effect of some other cognitive feature? The jury is still out.
- Books the lab is currently reading: Against the Grain, Catching Fire
- Coming from the discussion of books we are reading, some further thoughts on the psychological state of flow:
- How does flow relate to Expertise and SGOMS – Is expertise a flow state?
- Interruptions – SGOMS handles this, but flow is about *not* perceiving interruptions
- Cognitive tunneling – can this be a part of expertise?
Reinforcement Learning For The Win?
(By Jen Schellinck)
Game playing computers are getting better! It’s interesting that reinforcement learning (RL) as being used as a base strategy for these solutions, as described in Silver et al.’s (2017) recently published paper on AlphaGo Zero, arguably the most successful chess playing program to date. Perhaps most importantly, it was able to learn very quickly, without being exposed to large numbers of example chess games.
Chad pointed out that if you want to try out or learn more about reinforcement learning, you can check out two RL platforms released by OpenAI.
Unifying modeling lecture
David’s Emergic Modeling presentation on unifying modeling for Rob’s Cognitive Modeling course is now available online.