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The Fall 2015 semester's theme is _____________.-----is “Learning within constraints”. This is intentionally broad, in part because BCS itself has broadened this semester to include behavioral ecology approaches. Here are some examples of what we have in mind:
- Learning is constrained, and therefore shaped in form and content, by preexisting memory. How so?
- Learning is constrained by species-specific capacities and attunements, sensory or otherwise. When is this important?
- Learning is constrained by modality: how is learning about space different from, or similar to, learning about nonspatial stimuli? How is space encoded; how is this similar to and different from other types of information encoding? This could be a proxy for hippocampus = place codes vs hippocampus = episodic memory wars.
- Learning is strongly shaped by ‘educated guesses’ of whether a new stimulus is ‘the same’ as a previous stimulus or not: the former is based on generalization and leads to the reinforcement learning literature; the latter instead leads one into literatures of competition and interference among conflicting but similar memories. What do we know about this ongoing process, and is there something to be gained by combining and comparing the reinforcement learning literature with the interference literature? This essentially statistical process is also the basis for mimicry and its advantages, especially regarding imperfect mimics.
In order to make discussions more engaging and less formal, we encourage presentations to be primarily "chalk talks", in which concepts are sketched rather than figures shown. Mixed media are OK too, in which a complex figure can be put onto a slide or simply zoomed up on from the PDF file of the original paper, but drawing the figure tends to convey stronger understanding than does flashing a figure up on the wall. We also emphasize that you do not have to present papers in their entirety, much less multiple papers. Having everybody read up thoroughly on something small and focused usually makes for a better experience than everybody skimming one or more full papers. You may want to present only one exciting concept, exemplified by one or more figures drawn from one or more papers. That's great. Focus on the concepts, and don't feel compelled to master every detail of every paper that you want to include in your presentation. Do what you feel is best, but please do not just put the figures of a paper into a slide show and describe the paper.
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Please contact Thomas Cleland or David Smith with any questions.
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25 August 2015: Organizational Meeting
- Barron et al., 2015. Embracing multiple definitions of learning. Trends in Neurosciences 38(7):405.
- This short TINS paper reflects on different views of learning derived from different fields of study (neuroscience, psychology, behavioral ecology, machine learning).
1 September 2015: TBD
- TBD
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