Human decision-making deviates from the optimal solution, that maximizes cumulative rewards, in many situations. Here we approach this discrepancy from the perspective of bounded rationality and our goal is to provide a justification for such seemingly sub-optimal strategies. More specifically we investigate the hypothesis, that humans do not know optimal decision-making algorithms in advance, but instead employ a learned, resource-bounded approximation. The idea is formalized through combining a recently proposed meta-learning model based on Recurrent Neural Networks with a resource-bounded objective. The resulting approach is closely connected to variational inference and the Minimum Description Length principle. Empirical evidence is obtained from a two-armed bandit task. Here we observe patterns in our family of models that resemble differences between individual human participants.

We compare the acquisition of knowledge in humans and machines. Research from the field of developmental psychology indicates, that human-employed hypothesis are initially guided by simple rules, before evolving into more complex theories. This observation is shared across many tasks and domains. We investigate whether stages of development in artificial learning systems are based on the same characteristics. We operationalize developmental stages as the size of the data-set, on which the artificial system is trained. For our analysis we look at the developmental progress of Bayesian Neural Networks on three different data-sets, including occlusion, support and quantity comparison tasks. We compare the results with prior research from developmental psychology and find agreement between the family of optimized models and pattern of development observed in infants and children on all three tasks, indicating common principles for the acquisition of knowledge.

We propose a novel application of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to neural decoding: insteadof just trying to figure out which stimulus was presented, we demonstrate how to explore the semantic relationships in the neural representation of large sets of stimuli. FCA provides a way of displaying and interpreting such relationships via concept lattices. We explore the effects of neural code sparsity on the lattice. We then analyze neurophysiological data from high-level visual cortical areaSTSa, using an exact Bayesian approach to construct the formal context needed by FCA. Prominent features of the resulting concept lattices are discussed, including hierarchical face representation and indications for a product-of-experts code in real neurons.

The peristimulus time histogram (PSTH) and its more continuous cousin, the spike density function (SDF) are staples in the analytic toolkit of neurophysiologists. Theformer is usually obtained by binning spike trains, whereas the standard method for the latter is smoothing with a Gaussian kernel. Selection of a bin width or a kernel size is often done in an relatively arbitrary fashion, even though there have been recent attempts to remedy this situation [1, 2]. We develop an exact Bayesian, generative model approach to estimating PSTHs and demonstate its superiority to competing methods. Further advantages of our scheme include automatic complexity control and error bars on its predictions.