{"pk":28132,"title":"Learning list concepts through program induction","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans master complex systems of interrelated concepts likemathematics and natural language. Previous work suggestslearning these systems relies on iteratively and directly re-vising a language-like conceptual representation. We intro-duce and assess a novel concept learning paradigm calledMartha’s Magical Machines that captures complex relation-ships between concepts. We model human concept learning inthis paradigm as a search in the space of term rewriting sys-tems, previously developed as an abstract model of compu-tation. Our model accurately predicts that participants learnsome transformations more easily than others and that theylearn harder concepts more easily using a bootstrapping cur-riculum focused on their compositional parts. Our results sug-gest that term rewriting systems may be a useful model of hu-man conceptual representations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Concept learning; Program Induction; Induction;Function learning; Curriculum learning; Bootstrap learning"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51s4q6f5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rule","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Eric","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schulz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard","department":""},{"first_name":"Steven","middle_name":"T","last_name":"Piantadosi","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28132/galley/17791/download/"}]}