CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)

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Successful action in the face of turbulent change requires adaptive cognitive processes that both override those cognitive skills that are rendered obsolete and construct new skills to guide action in the altered environment. After a century of scientific progress in research on skill acquisition, we are still unable to explain or reproduce human-level cognitive flexibility. However, progress is being made. A few years ago, I reported some success in simulating adaptation with a cognitive model that learns from its own errors. Since then, there has been considerable development of the theory. The key principle is now that further progress in modeling human flexibility on computers will not come about through the competitive evaluation of new learning mechanisms, but through the synthesis of mechanisms already described in the research literature. To illustrate, I describe a system that incorporates two modes of adaptation, learning from success and learning from error, into a cognitive architecture called Icarus. Simulations demonstrate that the system is more able to adapt to change when it is operating with both mechanisms than with either mechanism in isolation. The improvement in adaptive performance is as high as 50% and more in some conditions. Implications of the multiple-mechanism perspective are discussed.

Stellan Ohlsson is Professor of Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He received his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Stockholm in 1980. He joined the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) in Pittsburgh in 1985 and was promoted to Senior Scientist in 1990. He moved to his present position at UIC in 1996. Dr. Ohlsson has published extensively on computational models of cognitive change, including creative insight, cognitive skill acquisition and conceptual change. He invented the concept of Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM), one of the cornerstones of research on intelligent tutoring systems. He has held grants from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), among other agencies. He is one of the co-originators of the AIED conference series, and he co-chaired the 1987 and 1993 conferences. He has been a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for Artificial Intelligence in Education and other cognitive journals. In 2010, Dr. Ohlsson co-chaired the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Dr. Ohlsson recently completed Deep Learning: How the Mind Overrides Experience, a synthesis of his research, published by Cambridge University Press.

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