{"pk":50205,"title":"Striking the Right Chord Between Reuse and Improvisation: Melody Learning as Resource-Rational Program Induction","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How do people balance the reuse of learned routines with the need to invent new solutions under cognitive limitations? Recent computational frameworks have begun to develop resource-rational approaches to program induction, with a common theme being the benefits of building a \"library\" of past solutions for creative reuse. Here, we study these mechanisms in an online experiment where participants learned real-world musical melodies. Our results reveal systematic error patterns during reconstruction and improvisation tasks, with participants repeating local patterns and displaying a behavioral bias consistent with simpler programs. To explain these findings, we developed a non-parametric Bayesian model using a hierarchical Pitman–Yor process to learn both a global library encoding domain-general primitives, and a local library capturing melody-specific motifs—both helping to constrain the hypothesis space. Our model makes testable predictions about human error distributions and adaptive behaviors that balance the trade-off between efficiency and creativity when resources are scarce.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Psychology; Behavioral Science; Music; Representation; Skill acquisition and learning; Knowledge representation; Symbolic computational modeling"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xk1619f","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hanqi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of TŸbingen","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"G.","last_name":"Nagy","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of TŸbingen","department":""},{"first_name":"Peter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dayan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics","department":""},{"first_name":"Charley","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of TŸbingen","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50205/galley/38167/download/"}]}