Sabbatical Report: Project End

The goal of my past sabbatical was to conduct a project that studied how simple artificial neural networks learned about uncertain environments. This project was completed this past August 10 when I submitted a 240 page monograph for review at Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews. The sabbatical not only involved the actual writing this monograph, but also the collection of new results to be reported. This involved a tremendous amount of new research activity. I developed a number of new mathematical proofs about the relationship between simple artificial neural networks and Bayesian probability. I conducted hundreds of network simulations in order to collect data on how such networks behave in uncertain environments when interactions between cues serve as signals of reward probabilities. I also collected data from 200 Introductory Psychology students to measure their behavior in similar environments, and to compare human probability learning to that of my networks. There are striking similarities between network and human performance, and one of the main goals of my monograph is to use this relationship to support the claim that human probability learning can potentially be modeled by very simple artificial neural networks.

While this study of probabilistic artificial neural networks was the primary activity of my sabbatical, I have also been able to develop a new research project (in collaboration with Cor Baerveldt and his students in the Department of Psychology) on the history of the Center for Advanced Study of Theoretical Psychology at the University of Alberta. In particular, during we have explored archival materials and used our findings to explore the development of the Center’s flagship course ‘Seminar in Theoretical Psychology’ as well as the relationship of Center activities to Cold War social science. Both of these projects have led to manuscripts, one that is currently under review at History of the Human Sciences, the other soon to appear in History of Psychology. I also presented a poster at the 50^th annual meeting of Cheiron on the contents of the books in the collection of the Center which are now included in the D.E. Smith Reading Room at the University of Alberta.

Sabbatical Report: End of Month 1

Today marks the end of the first month of my current year-long sabbatical. I thought that this was as good a time as any to reflect on what I have accomplished so far, and to consider where my research is heading.

While the sabbatical is only officially one month old, the stage for the project was set in the fall term of 2016. In order to be fortunate enough to be awarded a sabbatical, one must apply for it, and part of this application involves proposing the kind of work that will be accomplished during the sabbatical. I have a long history of writing a book during each year-long sabbatical that I have been awarded; the plan for the current sabbatical was no different. I proposed using the time to draft a manuscript that extended some recent work in my lab on simple artificial neural networks and probability theory, and was lucky enough to be given the green light for this kind of project from the Faculty of Arts.

With a sabbatical plan required in the fall, it is not surprising that I was in a position to start groundwork for the current sabbatical at the end of the fall term. Much of that work has involved doing a lot of reading – since marking the final exam for my fall cognitive science course, I have read 23 books on systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and probability. Those interested can see what I have been reading by looking through my Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/drmrwdawson/) for pictures of covers. I use #reading to tag these posts. I have also conducted a pretty extensive simulation study (which has involved training and analyzing the performance of 500 different perceptrons) that explores how networks match the probability of outcomes in a three-cue probability learning task. In the fall, I plan to collect data from human subjects that are trained on the same task that I have used to train the networks; I am pretty excited about the main result that I expect to observe when networks and humans are compared. This has meant that I have also written programs to collect this data from humans. Importantly, I have also successfully navigated the process for getting ethics approval for this work; I haven’t collected human data for years. Most importantly, I have already crafted three complete chapters of a new book manuscript (when published, it will be my eighth book) that relate networks to probability theory and information theory, that explore the relationship between simple networks and Bayes’ theorem in probability, and that report the results of my simulations.

As August begins, the sabbatical project turns to writing the opening chapter of the new book. I have enough of a ‘feel’ for the project now that I need to put it in the context of other theories, and need to lay out its purpose, methodology, and implications. Writing this chapter, though, requires me to do a lot more reading than I have been doing. Up to this point, I have been reading a book every 10 days or so, and I have to accelerate this. In short, currently my next steps are to read, to think, and eventually to write. Some sense of the different topics that I will be considering will be appearing in the near future as Instagrammed book covers.