Course finder
Semester 1
Induction: Analogy, Learning, and Generalisation in Humans and Machines (PSYL10176)
Subject
Psychology
College
CAHSS
Credits
20
Normal Year Taken
3
Delivery Session Year
2023/2024
Pre-requisites
Visiting students must be studying Psychology as their degree major, and have completed at least 3 Psychology courses at grade B or above., including a course equivalent to Data Analysis for Psychology in R 2 (PSYL08015). We will only consider University/College level courses. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**
Course Summary
This course covers topics in human and machine inductive inference, with particular emphasis on uniquely human level induction (analogy and cross-domain generalisation).
Course Description
In this course we will cover topics in human and machine inductive inference. In the first half of the course, students will be exposed to the problem of induction and how the problem manifests in a range of domains such as object recognition, categorisation, and learning. The focus of the course will then turn to analogy and relational reasoning, areas were humans make generalisations across situations and domains with much more success and flexibility than non-human animals and conventional machine learning approaches. We will cover research in analogical reasoning as well as the development of analogical thinking and the representations that support analogy and generalisation. The second half of the course will focus on computational theories of how humans and artificial (i.e., machine) systems perform induction and generalisation. We will cover broadly the main approaches to representing knowledge and modelling human cognition (symbolic and connectionist models). We will then cover how these approaches have been leveraged to explain human induction and learning with focus on traditional production system models, Bayesian models, neural network models, and symbolic-connectionist models. **Students will engage with lectures and readings every week and will be asked to actively engage with and discuss the topics covered. Students will complete a midterm consisting of MCQs and a short essay (500 words), a set of unassessed formative formal exercises including responses to readings and applications of simplified versions of existing computational models, and a final essay (2000 words).
Assessment Information
Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%
Additional Restrictions
Unless you are nominated on a Psychology exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year Psychology course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the September Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the extremely limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.
view the timetable and further details for this course
Disclaimer
All course information obtained from this visiting student course finder should be regarded as provisional. We cannot guarantee that places will be available for any particular course. For more information, please see the visiting student disclaimer: