Humans and machines rarely have access to explicit external feedback or supervision, yet manage to learn. Most modern machine learning systems succeed because they benefit from unsupervised data. Humans are also expected to benefit and yet, mysteriously, empirical results are mixed. Does unsupervised learning help humans or not? Here, we argue that the mixed results […]

Ji et al. investigated the unit of working memory manipulation. Participants were asked to update either the color or location of memorized information. Task difficulty depended on the number of Boolean maps involved, rather than the number of objects, suggesting that Boolean maps, not objects, are the units of manipulation. Read Full Article (External Site) […]

Everyone agrees that feelings and actions are intertwined, but cannot agree how. According to dominant models, actions are directed by estimates of value and these values shape or are shaped by affect. I propose instead that affect is the only form of value that drives actions. Our mind constantly represents potential future states and how […]