offline learning

A future aim of the lab is to understand how offline learning is utilized in human cognition to build plans and accelerate learning. Offline learning can be thought of generally as using our memories to simulate actions. It is “offline” in the sense that we do not receive actual states and rewards from real-world interaction, but instead retrieve those from some model of the world. Offline learning addresses the seeming paradox that humans can learn quickly despite having few real-world interactions with the states, actions and rewards for a given learning problem. This problem could be addressed in other ways, such as using prior knowledge in one-shot learning (i.e., planning), and having strong priors due to evolutionary-timescale learning. We plan to pursue the following questions:

• How do beliefs form and consolidate via offline learning?
• What is the emotional experience engendered during or following offline learning?
• What fundamental representations are used in human offline learning?