What Is the Model in Model‐Based Planning?

TitleWhat Is the Model in Model‐Based Planning?
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsPouncy, T, Tsividis, P, Gershman, SJ
JournalCognitive Science
Volume45
Issue1
Date Published01/2021
ISSN0364-0213
Abstract

Flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human problem-solving. In everyday life, people adapt to changes in common tasks with little to no additional training. Much of the existing work on flexibility in human problem-solving has focused on how people adapt to tasks in new domains by drawing on solutions from previously learned domains. In real-world tasks, however, humans must generalize across a wide range of within-domain variation. In this work we argue that representational abstraction plays an important role in such within-domain generalization. We then explore the nature of this representational abstraction in realistically complex tasks like video games by demonstrating how the same model-based planning framework produces distinct generalization behaviors under different classes of task representation. Finally, we compare the behavior of agents with these task representations to humans in a series of novel grid-based video game tasks. Our results provide evidence for the claim that within-domain flexibility in humans derives from task representations composed of propositional rules written in terms of objects and relational categories.

URLhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15516709/45/1
DOI10.1111/cogs.v45.110.1111/cogs.12928
Short TitleCogn Sci

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