Brain's Expectations Affect Learning

psychcentral.com

104 points·laurex··11 comments

> “The brain appears to be particularly active when a learning strategy has to be changed while it takes significantly less energy to maintain a strategy,” Pleger noted

What should we do, for better learning? Not have any particular preference, and don’t make a decision and force the brain to be open to new strategies. I’m misreading this?

I don't think any conclusion can be made here based on energy expended.

Go in with a playful attitude. It will help you balance being open with also being decisive. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=play+and+learning+resea...

Was I the only one wondering who Brian was?

i read Brian as well

Anyone have a link to the original paper?

I went back through the press release sources and found that it's actually based off of two recent papers:

[1] https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article-abstract/doi...

[2] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2020/03/30/JNEUROSCI...

Isn't this essentially what backpropagation does in neural networks?

Backpropagation as we use it is not feasible in the brain, and is a general algorithm, this case is more specific, it's actually reinforcement learning.

Expectations are part of RL, they measure if a strategy improves or not compared with previous experience.

What an itchy favicon.

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