nips nips2000 nips2000-16 nips2000-16-reference knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: pdf
Author: Jonathan D. Nelson, Javier R. Movellan
Abstract: People are active experimenters, not just passive observers, constantly seeking new information relevant to their goals. A reasonable approach to active information gathering is to ask questions and conduct experiments that maximize the expected information gain, given current beliefs (Fedorov 1972, MacKay 1992, Oaksford & Chater 1994). In this paper we present results on an exploratory experiment designed to study people's active information gathering behavior on a concept learning task (Tenenbaum 2000). The results of the experiment are analyzed in terms of the expected information gain of the questions asked by subjects. In scientific inquiry and in everyday life, people seek out information relevant to perceptual and cognitive tasks. Scientists perform experiments to uncover causal relationships; people saccade to informative areas of visual scenes, turn their head towards surprising sounds, and ask questions to understand the meaning of concepts . Consider a person learning a foreign language, who notices that a particular word,
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