Look-Ahead Monte Carlo with People

Charles Blundell, Adam Sanborn, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Investigating people’s representations of categories of complicated objects is a difficult challenge, not least because of the large number of ways in which such objects can vary. To make progress we need to take advantage of the structure of object categories – one compelling regularity is that object categories can be described by a small number of dimensions. We present Look-Ahead Monte Carlo with People, a method for exploring people’s representations of a category where there are many irrelevant dimensions. This method combines ideas from Markov chain Monte Carlo with People, an experimental paradigm derived from an algorithm for sampling complicated distributions, with hybrid Monte Carlo, a technique that uses directional information to construct efficient statistical sampling algorithms. We show that even in a simple example, our approach takes advantage of the structure of object categories to make experiments shorter and increase our ability to accurately estimate category representations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationBuilding Bridges Across Cognitive Sciences Around the World - Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2012
EditorsNaomi Miyake, David Peebles, Richard P. Cooper
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages1356-1361
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780976831884
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Building Bridges Across Cognitive Sciences Around the World, CogSci 2012 - Sapporo, Japan
Duration: Aug 1 2012Aug 4 2012

Publication series

NameBuilding Bridges Across Cognitive Sciences Around the World - Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2012

Conference

Conference34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Building Bridges Across Cognitive Sciences Around the World, CogSci 2012
Country/TerritoryJapan
CitySapporo
Period8/1/128/4/12

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

Keywords

  • Markov chain Monte Carlo
  • category representation
  • directional judgements

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