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A mixture of generative models strategy helps humans generalize across tasks.

What role do generative models play in generalization of learning in humans? Our novel multi-task prediction paradigm—where participants complete four sequence learning tasks, each being a different instance of a common generative family—allows the separate study of within-task learning (i.e., finding the solution to each of the tasks), and across-task learning (i.e., learning a task differently because of past experiences). The very first responses participants make in each task are not yet affected by within-task learning and thus reflect their priors. Our results show that these priors change across successive tasks, increasingly resembling the underlying generative family. We conceptualize multi-task learning as arising from a mixture-of-generative-models learning strategy, whereby participants simultaneously entertain multiple candidate models which compete against each other to explain the experienced sequences. This framework predicts specific error patterns, as well as a gating mechanism for learning, both of which are observed in the data.

Castañón, S. H., Cardoso-Leite, P., Altarelli, I., Green, C. S., Schrater, P., & Bavelier, D. (2021). A mixture of generative models strategy helps humans generalize across tasks. bioRxiv.