Learning to Selectively Attend

How is reinforcement learning possible in a high-dimensional world? Without making any assumptions about the structure of the state space, the amount of data required to effectively learn a value function grows exponentially with the state space’s dimensionality. However, humans learn to solve highdimensional problems much more rapidly than would be expected under this scenario. This suggests that humans employ inductive biases to guide (and accelerate) their learning. Here we propose one particular bias—sparsity—that ameliorates the computational challenges posed by high-dimensional state spaces, and present experimental evidence that humans can exploit sparsity information when it is available.