Open-sourcing Psychlab DeepMind

What appears to be a single task actually depends on multiple cognitive abilities. We face a similar problem in AI research, where the complexity of a task can often make it difficult to tease apart the individual skills required for an agent to be successful. But understanding an agent's specific cognitive skill set may prove useful for improving its overall performance. To address this problem in humans, psychologists have spent the last 150 years designing rigorously controlled experiments aimed at isolating one specific cognitive faculty at a time. For example, they might analyse the supermarket scenario using two separate tests - a "visual search" test that requires the subject to locate a specific shape in a pattern could be used to probe attention, while they might ask a person to recall items from a studied list to test their memory.