Learning to learn differently

Do Children and Adults Learn Differently?

This article addresses a question that was a topic of debate in the middle decades of the 20th century but was then abandoned as interest in children’s learning declined. The question is, does learning develop? In other words, does the learning process itself undergo age-related change, or does it remain invariant ontogenetically and phylogenetically, as early learning theories claimed? We sugg...

Learning to learn categories

Learning to categorize objects in the world is more than just learning the specific facts that characterize individual categories. We can also learn more abstract knowledge about how categories in a domain tend to be organized – extending even to categories that we’ve never seen examples of. These abstractions allow us to learn and generalize examples of new categories much more quickly than if...

Learning how to learn

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 percent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 percent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for this evolutionary expense [1]. Recently, I lost one of my aunts. S...

Learning to reinforcement learn

In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A critical present objective is thus to develop deep RL methods that can adapt rapidly to new tasks. In the present work we introduce a novel approach to this ...

Learning To Learn: Introduction