Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's reading notebooks
Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's reading notebooks
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.012
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发表时间：
2017-02-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
DeDeo, Simon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Murdock, Jaimie;Allen, Colin;DeDeo, Simon
在资源分布不确定的环境中进行搜索，需要在利用过去的发现和进一步探索之间进行权衡。这延伸到了信息搜寻，在这种情况下，知识寻求者在深入阅读和研究新领域之间转换。为了研究这一决策过程，我们考察了当代最著名的科学家之一查尔斯·达尔文的阅读选择。根据他按时间顺序排列的阅读期刊中列出的书籍全文，我们使用库尔巴克-利布勒散度(Kullback-Liebler Diffision)来生成主题模型，以量化他的局部(文本到文本)和全球(文本到过去)阅读决定，库尔巴克-利布勒散度是一种经过认知验证的相对惊讶的信息论衡量标准。达尔文的行为从早期的剥削转变为后来的探索，而不是与纯粹的剥削策略相对应的惊喜最小化模式，而是寻求与前几个时代相比异常高水平的认知惊喜。这些转变是由一个无监督的贝叶斯模型发现的，与他职业生涯中的主要知识时代相关，这一点由定性的学术研究和达尔文自己的自我评论来确定。我们的方法允许我们将他对文本的消费与他们的出版顺序进行比较。我们发现达尔文的消费比文化的生产更具探索性，这表明在逐渐的社会变化之下，是对个人综合和发现的探索。我们的定量方法通过测试个人和集体行为之间以及短期和长期消费选择之间的交互作用的框架来推进认知搜索的研究。这种新颖的主题建模应用来描述个人阅读，是对集体科学行为的广泛研究的补充。(C)2016爱思唯尔B.V.保留所有权利。
Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin's behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin's own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin's consumption more exploratory than the culture's production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short-and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.