Related papers: A rational analysis of curiosity
Due to the significant role that curiosity plays in our lives, several theoretical constructs, such as the information gap theory and compression progress theory, have sought to explain how we engage in its practice. According to the…
Curiosity-driven learning has shown significant positive effects on students' learning experiences and outcomes. But despite this importance, reports show that children lack this skill, especially in formal educational settings. To address…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
A demandance is a psychological "pull" exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of "affordance". I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine…
An origin is often an intriguing issue. It becomes doubly intriguing when the logical form of thinking is considered. In this paper we will investigate exactly that: we will conjecture on the origin of basic instruments of logical thinking.…
This chapter presents probability logic as a rationality framework for human reasoning under uncertainty. Selected formal-normative aspects of probability logic are discussed in the light of experimental evidence. Specifically, probability…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…
Confidence estimates are often "detection-like" - driven by positive evidence in favour of a decision. This empirical observation has been interpreted as showing that human metacognition is limited by biases or heuristics. Here, we show…
We discuss the objectives of any endeavor in creating artificial intelligence, AI, and provide a possible alternative. Intelligence might be an unintended consequence of curiosity left to roam free, best exemplified by a frolicking infant.…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments…
Discovering causal relationships is a hard task, often hindered by the need for intervention, and often requiring large amounts of data to resolve statistical uncertainty. However, humans quickly arrive at useful causal relationships. One…
We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence, that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various…
Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…