Author: walterstiers
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Bayesian Models of Cognition
“Bayesian Models of Cognition Reverse Engineering the Mind” is a new MIT-press Open Access book available for online reading. The definitive introduction to Bayesian cognitive science, written by pioneers of the field. How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How do our minds get so much from so little? Bayesian models of cognition provide…
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Predecisional information search adaptively reduces uncertainty
“Predecisional information search adaptively reduces three typesof uncertainty“ How do people search for information when they are given the opportunity to freely explore their options? Information search is an integral part of the decision-making process. Every choice we make is based on information that must first be obtained. In many cases, information search is inherently…
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Does expertise protect?
“Does expertise protect”Does expertise protect against overclaiming false knowledge?“ Highlights Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a…
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The power of parsimony
“Walking the talk on multi-level interventions: The power of parsimony“ There is strong consensus regarding the need for multi-level interventions (MLIs) to address today’s complex health problems. The greatest public health burdens globally (e.g., chronic and infectious diseases) derive from a mix of causal and contributing factors and are inherently complex, operating interdependently and reflexively…
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Seven Kinds of Decisions…
“Seven Kinds of Decisions Sports Coaches Make” The article describes the main kinds of decisions coaches make on a regular basis, based on the nature of the thought processes involved. We distinguish seven primary types and one special type. The primary types are roughly ordered from the fast, simple and intuitive at one end, to…
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The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind
“The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind“:Karl Friston’s free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, ‘wishful’. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle.…
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Energy cost of computation: stochastic thermodynamics?
“Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?” The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational properties of physical systems has been a major theoretical interest since at least the 19th century. It has also become of increasing practical importance over the last half-century as the energetic cost of digital devices has…
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Communicate Unflattening
I already mentioned in a previous blog entry the “Krebs Cycle of Creativity“, a map that describes the perpetuation of creative energy, analogous to the Krebs Cycle proper. In this analogy of the Krebs Cycle, the four modalities of human creativity— Science, Engineering, Design and Art— replace the Krebs Cycle’s carbon compounds. Each of the modalities…
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Functional Trade-offs in Cognition
“Basic Functional Trade-offs in Cognition: An Integrative Framework” by Marco Del Giudice and Bernard J. Crespi, 2018. Trade-offs between advantageous but conflicting properties (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) are ubiquitous in cognition, but the relevant literature is conceptually fragmented, scattered across disciplines, and has not been organized in a coherent framework. This paper takes an initial step toward a general…
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Nature heals
“Nature heals: An informational entropy account of self-organization and change in field psychotherapy“Highlights This paper reviews biophysical models of psychotherapeutic change based on synergetics and the free energy principle. These models suggest that introducing sensory surprise into the patient-therapist system can lead to self-organization and the formation of new attractor states, disrupting entrenched patterns of…
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Affect-centered account of motivated behavior
“The affective gradient hypothesis: an affect-centered account of motivated behavior“: everyone agrees that feelings and actions are intertwined, but cannot agree how. According to dominant models, actions are directed by estimates of value and these values shape or are shaped by affect. The article proposes instead that affect is the only form of value that…
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KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION hindered by KNOWLEDGE ENTROPY DECAY during language model pretraining
This paper describes how a model’s tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. The concept of knowledge entropy is introduced, which quantifies the range of memory sources the model engages with; high knowledge entropy indicates that the…
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Movement Matters
An Open Access book from MIT press, Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning (available for download). Experts translate the latest findings on embodied cognition from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body…
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regulation of motivated behavior
in “A unified theoretical framework underlying the regulation of motivated behavior“, Yu-Been Kim, Young Hee Lee, Shee-June Park and Hyung Jin Choi explain that multiple psychological components have evolved in order to orchestrate behaviors for survival. Despite several theories regarding behavior regulation, these theories do not clearly distinguish distinct components and do not explain the…
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