{"pk":26938,"title":"Multitasking Capability Versus Learning Efficiencyin Neural Network Architectures","subtitle":null,"abstract":"One of the most salient and well-recognized features of humangoal-directed behavior is our limited ability to conduct mul-tiple demanding tasks at once. Previous work has identifiedoverlap between task processing pathways as a limiting fac-tor for multitasking performance in neural architectures. Thisraises an important question: insofar as shared representationbetween tasks introduces the risk of cross-talk and thereby lim-itations in multitasking, why would the brain prefer shared taskrepresentations over separate representations across tasks? Weseek to answer this question by introducing formal considera-tions and neural network simulations in which we contrast themultitasking limitations that shared task representations incurwith their benefits for task learning. Our results suggest thatneural network architectures face a fundamental tradeoff be-tween learning efficiency and multitasking performance in en-vironments with shared structure between tasks.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"multitasking; cognitive control; capacity con-straint; learning; neural networks"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t85k9bm","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Sebastian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Musslick","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Saxe","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Kayhan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ozcimder","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Biswadip","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dey","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Greg","middle_name":"","last_name":"Henselman","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pennsylvania","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Cohen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26938/galley/16574/download/"}]}