Edinburgh Psychology Keynote Talk

Speaker: Dr Maithilee Kunda (School of Informatics)

Title: Reasoning with visual imagery: Research at the intersection of autism, AI, and visual thinking

Abstract: While decades of AI research on high-level reasoning have yielded many techniques for many tasks, we are still quite far from having artificial agents that can just “sit down" and perform tasks like intelligence tests without highly specialized algorithms or training regimes. We also know relatively little about how and why different people approach reasoning tasks in different (often equally successful) ways, including in neurodivergent conditions such as autism. In this talk, I will discuss: 1) my lab's work on AI approaches for reasoning with visual imagery to solve intelligence tests, and what these findings suggest about visual cognition in autism; 2) how imagery-based agents might learn their domain knowledge and problem-solving strategies via search and experience, instead of these components being manually designed, including recent leaderboard results on the very difficult Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC) ARCathon challenge; and 3) how this research can help us understand cognitive strategy differences in people, with applications related to neurodiversity and employment.

Further information

For further information please contact Dr Jasmin Wertz.

The talk is open to all PPLS staff and postgraduate students as well as Psychology undergraduate students in Year 3 and 4.