Conveners
From Exploration to Decision-Making
- Sacha Christoph Engelhardt (University of Göttingen)
From Exploration to Decision-Making
- Sarah Eiteljoerge (Psychology of Language, University of Göttingen)
Helping genetically unrelated others is seen across group-living species and may reflect social preferences including other-regard and inequality aversion. Whereas social preferences have been revealed in humans, there is ambiguous report on other-regard in non-human primates. Observed helping in non-human primates may reflect evolved social preferences but self-regard and by-product mutualism...
Chasing prey or foraging requires evaluating distant stimuli, transforming this information into an action plan, and adjusting ongoing behavior in a timely manner. The evolutionary expansion of the frontal cortex is considered responsible for enhanced behavioral flexibility and an extended spatiotemporal radius of potential actions, enabling us to make mid-movement decisions about distant...
Learning from social feedback is fundamental for flexible behavior across species, and deficits in such flexibility can impair social wellbeing. To investigate the neural basis of social flexibility, we studied male Drosophila melanogaster, whose quantifiable social behavior and genetic accessibility offer a tractable vertebrate‑relevant model. Building on prior work showing that past social...
Optimal decision-making benefits from exploring available options. However, in stable environments exploitation and using the same decision strategy can be more efficient. We tested exploration (gaze pattern) in a base-rate task.
Sixty-two participants had to determine a hypothetical individual’s most likely class membership using two information pieces: base-rates (prevalence) and an...
Introduction: While the environment plays a critical role in shaping numerical abilities, most of our understanding stems from Western countries, which in turn creates the risk of overgeneralising. This study aimed to expand our knowledge by comparing early numerical development and environmental factors surrounding it in children from both South Africa and the UK. We hypothesised differences...
Research shows that young children are “naive psychologists”, adept at understanding and navigating the social world. However, much of this work portrays them as passive recipients of information about other agents. When such information is not available, children may leverage their competences for active learning, exploration, and hypothesis-testing to acquire it. We report two studies which...
Language acquisition relies on successful coordination of infant attention and parent speech. While infants’ exploration frequently guides both partners’ focus of attention during free play, parent speech has been shown to extend infants’ attention towards already fixated objects. So far, little is known about the role of qualitative characteristics of parent speech in coordinating such...
Children acquire language not just by listening, but through interacting with others in their social context. Inspired by this active learning, we ask: can language models become better storytellers if they learn not only from next-word prediction, but also from high-level, cognitively-inspired feedback? We train a student model to generate stories, with a teacher model rating each attempt...
