{"id":1844,"date":"2012-06-04T22:16:39","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T21:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=1844"},"modified":"2012-06-04T22:16:56","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T21:16:56","slug":"new-paper-a-novel-task-for-the-investigation-of-action-acquisition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2012\/06\/04\/new-paper-a-novel-task-for-the-investigation-of-action-acquisition\/","title":{"rendered":"New paper: A novel task for the investigation of action acquisition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our new paper, <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.plos.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.0037749\">A novel task for the investigation of action acquisition<\/a>, has been published in PLoS One today. The paper describes a new paradigm we&#8217;ve been using to investigate how actions are learnt. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a curious fact that although psychologists have thoroughly investigated how actions are valued (i.e. how you figure out how good or bad a thing is to do), and how actions are trained (i.e. shaped and refined over time), the same effort has not gone into investigating how a behaviour is first identified and stored as a part of our repertoire. We hope this task provides a useful tool for opening up this area for investigation.<\/p>\n<p>As well as the basic description of the task, the paper also contains a section outlining how the form of learning the the task makes available for inspection is different from the forms of learning made available by other &#8216;action learning&#8217; tasks (such as, for example, operant conditioning tasks). In addition to serving an under-investigated area of learning research, the task also has a number of practical benefits. It is scalable in difficulty, suitable for repeated measures designs (meaning you can do it again and again &#8211; it isn&#8217;t something you learn once and then can&#8217;t be tested on any more) as well being adaptable for different species (meaning you can test humans and non-human animals on the task).<\/p>\n<p>The paper is based on work done as part of the EU robotics project I&#8217;m on (&#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.im-clever.eu\/\" title=\"not my acronym!\">I&#8217;M-CLeVeR<\/a>&#8216;) and on Tom Walton&#8217;s PhD thesis, <a href=\"http:\/\/etheses.whiterose.ac.uk\/2204\/\">The Discovery of Novel Actions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our new paper, A novel task for the investigation of action acquisition, has been published in PLoS One today. The paper describes a new paradigm we&#8217;ve been using to investigate how actions are learnt. It&#8217;s a curious fact that although psychologists have thoroughly investigated how actions are valued (i.e. how you figure out how good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","category-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-tK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1844"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1856,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions\/1856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}