Motivated learning for the development of autonomous systems

A new machine learning approach known as motivated learning (ML) is presented in this work. Motivated learning drives a machine to develop abstract motivations and choose its own goals. ML also provides a self-organizing system that controls a machine’s behavior based on competition between dynamically-changing pain signals. This provides an interplay of externally driven and internally generated control signals. It is demonstrated that ML not only yields a more sophisticated learning mechanism and system of values than reinforcement learning (RL), but is also more efficient in learning complex relations and delivers better performance than RL in dynamically-changing environments. In addition, this paper shows the basic neural network structures used to create abstract motivations, higher level goals, and subgoals. Finally, simulation results show comparisons between ML and RL in environments of gradually increasing sophistication and levels of difficulty.     

Developing research‐informed practitioners – an organisational perspective

Background: Two current trends are making it increasingly important for counsellors and psychotherapists to be more engaged with research. Evidence of effectiveness is being increasingly demanded by those who fund our therapies and also by our clients. Meanwhile therapy research is offering practicable ways for therapists to improve their practice. Therapy organisations have an opportunity, perhaps even a duty, to meet the research needs of their members. Methods: This paper reports on a survey conducted by the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) to help it plan the activities of its Research Faculty. Findings: Key findings from the survey were that the most common ways of UKCP practitioners engaging with research were through reading, discussions with colleagues and doing research. Engaging with research collaboratively with other therapists, having more time, and access to user‐friendly web‐based research resources and updates, were the factors most commonly cited as supporting practitioner engagement with research. Conversely, lack of time, difficulties accessing resources and materials and feeling not competent were the major barriers to practitioner engagement with research. Discussion: Implications for therapists, for training, and for therapy organisations are considered.     

MULTIFUNCTIONAL,SELF-ORGANIZING BIOSPHERE LANDSCAPES AND THE FUTURE OF OUR TOTAL HUMAN ECOSYSTEM

Solar energy powered autopoietic (self-creating and regenerative) natural and cultural biosphere landscapes fulfill vital multiple functions for the sustainable future of organic life and its biological evolution and for human physical and mental health. At the present crucial Macroshift from the industrial to the post- industrial information age, their future and therefore also that of our Total Human Ecosystem, integrating humans and their total environment, is endangered by the exponential growth and waste products of urban-industrial technosphere landscapes and agro-industrial bio-technosphere landscapes.

This danger can be prevented only by the creation of new symbiotic relations between human society and nature with the help of mutual supportive, restorative cultural and economic cross-catalytic networks in our Total human Ecosystem. This should be part of an all—embracing sustainability revolution, driven by human consciousness and its responsibility to act as stewards rather than exploiters of the complex and harmonious web of life on this planet.     

Mapping the Structure of Semantic Memory

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual’s semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1‐hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small‐world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale‐free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual’s semantic memory.     

The Modulation of Visual and Task Characteristics of a Writing System on Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition—A Computational Exploration

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) biases in the LH. We show two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme‐phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme‐phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme‐phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing.     

Emerging perspectives on the structure and function of attitude strength

For more than 20 years, scholars have used the term “attitude strength” to refer to the durability and impactfulness of attitudes, and a large literature attests to the important leverage that this concept offers for understanding and predicting behaviour. Despite its prominence, however, a number of fundamental questions remain regarding the structure and function of attitude strength. In this chapter we draw on a wide range of evidence to clarify the nature of attitude strength. Rather than conceiving of attitude strength as a meaningful psychological construct, we argue that it is better conceptualised as an umbrella term that refers in only the most general way to multiple, separable classes of attitude outcomes, instigated by different antecedents and produced by distinct psychological processes. Although strong attitudes share a set of general qualities—resistance to change, persistence over time, impact on thought and behaviour—there are many distinct routes by which attitudes come to possess these qualities, and many diverse ways in which these qualities manifest themselves. Our analysis shifts the focus away from the structural properties of attitude strength and towards a fuller appreciation of the distinct sources from which attitudes derive their strength. We argue in particular for the value of attending more closely to the social bases of attitude strength, and we illustrate the value of this approach by reviewing several lines of research.     

Editorial

Abstract

The relationship between John Calvin, Pierre Viret, and Guillaume Farel has been characterized as a ‘triumvirate,’ a ‘patriarchate,’ and as a ‘close friendship.’ Despite the overwhelming attention paid by modern scholars to Calvin alone, the three of them were viewed by contemporary friends and enemies alike as a team. To friends, they were the ‘triumvirs’ who provided much needed leadership to the nascent Reformed Church in the Francophone world. To Protestant enemies, they were the ‘three patriarchs’ who sought to dominate the other pastors in the region. Their personal friendship was close, at least until Farel's marriage to a teenage girl. Scholarship until now, however, has largely ignored the friendship between Viret and Farel, partly because much of their correspondence remains unedited. Looking ahead, a potentially fruitful approach to examining their relationship would be to evaluate their network of associates and correspondents in order to gain a better understanding of exactly where and how their ideas affected sixteenth-century society.     

A Modeling Study of Potential Sources of Curvature in Human Reaching Movements

The authors of this article suggest that the slight but consistent posture-dependent curvature of the spatial paths in the kinematic transformation between intrinsic and extrinsic coordinates may result in a systematic curvature of movements initially planned as straight-line trajectories toward the target. A kinematic planning model is presented that takes into account the anisotropy of the intrinsic and extrinsic transformation and tends to avoid movements that require excessive joint rotations by introducing slight deviations from a straight-line trajectory. Preliminary simulations showed reasonably good agreement with experimental data, especially considering that the current model is strictly based on kinematics. A quantitative analysis showed that the strategy used in the model achieves a favorable compromise between straight-line movements and angular joint changes: By slightly increasing the spatial length of the movement (i.e., by introducing curvature), an individual can greatly reduce the total amount of joint rotation required to produce the movement.     

The Utility of Connectionism for Motor Learning: A Reinterpretation of Contextual Interference in Movement Schemas

Using the general framework of schema theory, and building on it, the present article takes a connectionist approach to motor learning and to contextual interference effects. These phenomena were simulated in an exploratory manner in neural networks. The outcome closely reflects previous research with humans. In a simulated ballistic movement task, networks performed worse during practice but showed better transfer when target movement distances were presented in a random rather than a blocked fashion. Connectionism provides a parsimonious account of the effect in terms of properties inherent in the parallel distributed network.