Simplifying social learning

Trends Cogn Sci. 2024 Feb 7:S1364-6613(24)00004-4. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.004. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTSocial learning is complex, but people often seem to navigate social environments with ease. This ability creates a puzzle for traditional accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) that assume people negotiate a tradeoff between easy-but-simple behavior (model-free learning) and complex-but-difficult behavior (e.g., model-based learning). We offer a theoretical framework for resolving this puzzle: although social environments are complex, people have social expertise that helps them behave flexibly with low cognitive cost. Specifically, by using familiar concepts instead of focusing on novel details, people can turn hard learning problems into simpler ones. This ability highlights social learning as a prototype for studying cognitive simplicity in the face of environmental complexity and identifies a role for conceptual knowledge in everyday reward learning.PMID:38331595 | DOI:10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.004

Source: Trends Cogn Sci - February 8, 2024 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Leor M Hackel David A Kalkstein Peter Mende-Siedlecki Source Type: research