Probabilistic models of learning and cognitive development, May 2009 workshop, Banff, Canada

拟议的讲习班将在班夫国际数学创新和发现研究站举行，旨在利用人类认知正式模型研究的一个重要新方向，探索学习和认知发展的概率模型。在过去的二十年里，统计学、计算机科学和机器学习领域在概率模型的使用方面取得了技术进步，这使得这项研究事业成为可能，产生了一套数学和计算工具，可用于构建心理现象的明确模型。通过指出理性学习者可能从经验提供的数据中得出的结论，贝叶斯模型可以用来研究先天和后天如何对人类知识做出贡献。虽然计算模型在过去已经被用来帮助学习的实证研究，但缺乏正式理论家和实验室之间的沟通和合作一直是一个绊脚石。本次研讨会将汇集两组研究人员：计算建模专家和研究认知发展的科学家。我们的目标是报告和讨论我们迄今为止在现有的合作研究中所取得的进展，并促进计算科学家和学习研究人员之间的未来合作，从而为人们的学习和发展带来新的见解和新的模型。将特别强调将这些见解应用于教育研究和实践的发展战略。

The proposed workshop, to be held at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery, aims to capitalize on a major new direction in research on formal models of human cognition, exploring probabilistic models of learning and cognitive development. The technical advances that have been made in the use of probabilistic models over the last twenty years in statistics, computer science, and machine learning have made this research enterprise possible, resulting in a set of mathematical and computational tools that can be used to build explicit models of psychological phenomena. By indicating the conclusions that a rational learner might draw from the data provided by experience, Bayesian models can be used to investigate how nature and nurture contribute to human knowledge. Although computational models have been used to aid empirical research on learning in the past, the lack of communication and collaboration between formal theorists and experimental laboratories has always been a stumbling block. This workshop will bring together two groups of researchers: experts in computational modeling and scientists studying cognitive development. The goal is both to report and to discuss the progress we have made so far with existing collaborative research and to foster future collaborations between computational scientists and learning researchers, leading to new insights and new models of how people learn and develop. A special emphasis will be placed on developing strategies of the application of these insights to educational research and practice.