EITM: Minimization of complexity in human concept learning

这个项目研究人类学习者如何从例子中形成概括，重点是概念复杂性如何影响学习。 当诱导概念时，如当学习者在仅观看几个单独的椅子之后形成概念“椅子”的抽象时，人类学习者偏向于简单;即，它们倾向于归纳出与例子一致的最简单的概括。 然而，“简单”一词的确切含义在严格的理论中是非常难以捕捉的。 这个项目借鉴了最近在量化概念的简单性和复杂性方面取得的进展，这些方法在数学上是合理的，在心理上是准确的。 该项目旨在将这一进展推广到比以前更广泛的人类概念类型，包括“模糊”概率概念和连续特征定义的概念。 该项目涉及数学建模和人类受试者学习各种概念的广泛实验。 通过扩展我们对人类学习中复杂性最小化的理解，该项目旨在建立一个更完整的人类学习机制的帐户。该项目具有许多潜在的科学利益，包括更好地理解人类学习和更有效的自动化学习机制的可能性。 更广泛地说，这个项目有可能帮助量化是什么让一些概念天生比其他概念更容易让人类学习，这可能直接应用于教育实践和学习障碍的治疗理解。

This project investigates how human learners form generalizations from examples, focusing on how conceptual complexity influences learning. When inducing concepts, as when a learner forms an abstraction of the concept "chair" after viewing only a few individual chairs, human learners have a bias towards simplicity; i.e., they tend to induce the simplest generalizations consistent with the examples. The exact meaning of the term "simple," however, is notoriously difficult to capture in a rigorous theory. This project draws on recent progress in quantifying conceptual simplicity and complexity in ways that are both mathematically sound and psychologically accurate. The project seeks to generalize this progress to apply to a wider range of human conceptual types than has previously been possible, including "fuzzy" probabilistic concepts and concepts defined over continuous features. The project involves both mathematical modeling and extensive experiments on human subjects learning a wide variety of concepts. By extending our understanding of complexity-minimization in human learning, the project aims to build a more complete account of the mechanisms underlying human learning.This project has many potential scientific benefits, including a greater understanding of human learning and the possibility of more effective automated learning mechanisms. More broadly, this project has the potential to help quantify what makes some concepts inherently easier for humans to learn than others, which could have direct applications to education practices and to treatment understanding of learning disorders.