Uhm. Is there any known experiment that has been tried which has failed with respect to RL?
In the sense, has there been an experiment where one says RL should predict X, but X did not happen. The lack of such a conclusive experiment would be somewhat evidence in favor of RL. Provided of course that the lack of such an experiment is not due to other reasons such as inability to design a proper test (indicating a lack of understanding of the properties of RL) or lack of the experiment happening to due to real world impracticalities (not enough attention having been cast on RL, not enough funding for a proper experiment to have been conducted etc.)
In general scientists do a lot of experiments where they make predictions about learning and those predictions turn out to be false. That goes for predictions based on RL as well as prediction based on other models.
Wikipedia describes RL as:
Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning inspired by behaviorist psychology, concerned with how software agents ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of cumulative reward.
Given that’s an area of machine learning you usually don’t find psychologists talking about RL. They talk about behaviorism. There are tons of papers published on behaviorism and after a while the cognitive revolution came along and most psychologists moved beyond RL.
Uhm, I kind of felt the pigeon experiment was a little misleading.
Yes, the pigeons did a great job of switching doors and learning through LR.
Human RL however (seems to me) takes place in a more subtle manner. While the pigeons seemed to focus on a more object level prouctivity, human RL would seem to take up a more complicated route.
But even that’s kind of besides the point.
In the article that Kaj had posted above, with the Amy Sutherland trying the LRS on her husband, it was an interesting point to note that the RL was happening at a rather unconscious level. In the monty hall problem solving type of cognition, the brain is working at a much more conscious active level.
So it seems more than likely to me that while LR works in humans, it gets easily over-ridden if you will by conscious deliberate action.
One other point is also worth noting in my opinion.
Human brains come with a lot more baggage than pigeon brains. Therefore, it is more than likely than humans have learnt not to switch through years of re-enforced learning. It makes it much harder to unlearn the same thing in a smaller period of time.
The pigeons having lesser cognitive load may have a lot less to unlearn and may have made it easier for them to learn the switching pattern.
Also, I just realised that I didn’t quite answer your question. Sorry about that I got carried away in my argument.
But the answer is no, I don’t have anything specific in mind. Also, I don’t know enough about things like what effects RL will have on memory, preferences etc. But I kind of feel that I could design an experiment if I knew more about it.
Uhm. Is there any known experiment that has been tried which has failed with respect to RL?
In the sense, has there been an experiment where one says RL should predict X, but X did not happen. The lack of such a conclusive experiment would be somewhat evidence in favor of RL. Provided of course that the lack of such an experiment is not due to other reasons such as inability to design a proper test (indicating a lack of understanding of the properties of RL) or lack of the experiment happening to due to real world impracticalities (not enough attention having been cast on RL, not enough funding for a proper experiment to have been conducted etc.)
In general scientists do a lot of experiments where they make predictions about learning and those predictions turn out to be false. That goes for predictions based on RL as well as prediction based on other models.
Wikipedia describes RL as:
Given that’s an area of machine learning you usually don’t find psychologists talking about RL. They talk about behaviorism. There are tons of papers published on behaviorism and after a while the cognitive revolution came along and most psychologists moved beyond RL.
Not quite true, especially not if you count neuroscientists as psychologists. There have been quite a few papers by psychologists and neuroscientists talking about reinforcement learning in the last few years alone.
It appears to me that ChristianKI just listed four. Did you have something specific in mind?
Uhm, I kind of felt the pigeon experiment was a little misleading.
Yes, the pigeons did a great job of switching doors and learning through LR.
Human RL however (seems to me) takes place in a more subtle manner. While the pigeons seemed to focus on a more object level prouctivity, human RL would seem to take up a more complicated route.
But even that’s kind of besides the point.
In the article that Kaj had posted above, with the Amy Sutherland trying the LRS on her husband, it was an interesting point to note that the RL was happening at a rather unconscious level. In the monty hall problem solving type of cognition, the brain is working at a much more conscious active level.
So it seems more than likely to me that while LR works in humans, it gets easily over-ridden if you will by conscious deliberate action.
One other point is also worth noting in my opinion.
Human brains come with a lot more baggage than pigeon brains. Therefore, it is more than likely than humans have learnt not to switch through years of re-enforced learning. It makes it much harder to unlearn the same thing in a smaller period of time. The pigeons having lesser cognitive load may have a lot less to unlearn and may have made it easier for them to learn the switching pattern.
Also, I just realised that I didn’t quite answer your question. Sorry about that I got carried away in my argument.
But the answer is no, I don’t have anything specific in mind. Also, I don’t know enough about things like what effects RL will have on memory, preferences etc. But I kind of feel that I could design an experiment if I knew more about it.