{"pk":28680,"title":"Reinforcement Learning and Insight in the Artificial Pigeon","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The phenomenon of insight (also called “Aha!” or “Eureka!”moments) is considered a core component of creative cogni-tion. It is also a puzzle and a challenge for statistics-basedapproaches to behavior such as associative learning and rein-forcement learning. We simulate a classic experiment on in-sight in pigeons using deep Reinforcement Learning. We showthat prior experience may produce large and rapid performanceimprovements reminiscent of insights, and we suggest theo-retical connections between concepts from machine learning(such as the value function or overfitting) and concepts frompsychology (such as feelings-of-warmth and the einstellung ef-fect). However, the simulated pigeons were slower than thereal pigeons at solving the test problem, requiring a greateramount of trial and error: their “insightful” behavior was sud-den by comparison with learning from scratch, but slow bycomparison with real pigeons. This leaves open the questionof whether incremental improvements to reinforcement learn-ing algorithms will be sufficient to produce insightful behavior.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"reinforcement learning; insight; creativity"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18w9n1gf","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"R.","last_name":"Colin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Plymouth","department":""},{"first_name":"Tony","middle_name":"","last_name":"Belpaeme","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Plymouth","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28680/galley/18551/download/"}]}