Expecting the unexpected: how people prioritise predictability. This project aims to investigate how people represent and use information about unpredictability in their environment. Seeing too much predictability is problematic, but seeing too little can also be a problem, for example inappropriate "learned helplessness" can occur, whereby people feel disempowered because the world is seen as random. Recent findings demonstrated a bias in fundamental learning that may maintain these inappropria ....Expecting the unexpected: how people prioritise predictability. This project aims to investigate how people represent and use information about unpredictability in their environment. Seeing too much predictability is problematic, but seeing too little can also be a problem, for example inappropriate "learned helplessness" can occur, whereby people feel disempowered because the world is seen as random. Recent findings demonstrated a bias in fundamental learning that may maintain these inappropriate beliefs about unpredictability. This bias is not anticipated by formal theories of learning. The project will investigate how this bias is brought about by first formalising a novel theory of fundamental learning and then systematically testing its assumptions.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE150100667
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$328,000.00
Summary
How “known unknowns” become known: How do people encode unpredictability? As Donald Rumsfeld noted, there are 'known unknowns’. That is to say, people are seemingly capable of learning that some things cannot be reliably predicted. This learning underpins decisions from the trivial (whether to pack a jacket) to the life-defining (whom to marry). An aberrant form of this learning may also underlie mental health disorders. Yet the mechanisms of such learning have been largely overlooked by cogniti ....How “known unknowns” become known: How do people encode unpredictability? As Donald Rumsfeld noted, there are 'known unknowns’. That is to say, people are seemingly capable of learning that some things cannot be reliably predicted. This learning underpins decisions from the trivial (whether to pack a jacket) to the life-defining (whom to marry). An aberrant form of this learning may also underlie mental health disorders. Yet the mechanisms of such learning have been largely overlooked by cognitive scientists and thus are poorly understood. The project, which is based on significant pilot data, aims to examine when and how people learn about unpredictability, and what the cognitive, memorial, neural and affective consequences of this learning are.Read moreRead less