Adaptation and Unsupervised Learning

Adaptation is a ubiquitous neural and psychological phenomenon, with a wealth of instantiations and implications. Although a basic form of plasticity, it has, bar some notable exceptions, attracted computational theory of only one main variety. In this paper, we study adaptation from the perspective of factor analysis, a paradigmatic technique of unsupervised learning. We use factor analysis to reinterpret a standard view of adaptation, and apply our new model to some recent data on adaptation in the domain of face discrimination.