Grow your own representations: Computational constructivism

From a cognitivist standpoint, one main interest of psychology is the study of representations of the human mind as they mediate how people react to stimuli in their environment (Palmer, 1978). This can explain why two people that encounter the same stimulus can behave in very different ways (Chomsky, 1959). For example, an art historian viewing a Jackson Pollock painting may exclaim " this is beautiful " due to her representation of his work as a rejection of painting with a brush; however, a lay person may say " this is ugly " due to his representation of the painting as a cluttered mess of colors. Without knowledge of the representations of each person in this example, it would be nearly impossible to explain their behavior when interacting with the Jackson Pollock painting. Over the last three decades, cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that the representations people use can change flexibly to capture changes in their environment However, if the representations we use are determined by the stimuli in our environment, this threatens the explanatory utility of representations as it could be superfluous to use representations to explain people's reaction to stimuli if the representations are determined by the stimuli. Thus, cognitive psychologists need to explicitly formulate how representations change with experience. Although computational modelers, from connectionists to Bayesians, disagree on many things, one thing they do agree on is the importance of representations in their models (Mc-Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring computational models that adapt their representations with experience in ways that match this human capacity. In this symposium, we explore computational models that adapt their representations with experience in ways that are inspired by the human capability. Recently, there have been several proposals for computational models whose representations flexibly adapt to the input data like people do; however, there has not been a thorough comparison of the different models. The goal of the symposium is the compare and contrast the different methods , evaluate their ability to capture of human representation learning, and make explicit what is meant in each model by " representation change " as this can be a controversial claim (Schyns et al., 1998). Currently, it is not clear whether or not the different proposals mean the same thing by a " representation " and if they are competing proposals to explain the same aspect of human cognition or different levels of …