KolloquiumMontag, 25.06. 2012, 17:00 Uhr, WP3/E09A

Frank Jäkel, Juniorprofessor Uni Osnabrück: Categorization: From Psychology to Machine Learning and Back

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive ability. Many, if not all, so-called higher cognitive functions, like language or problem-solving, crucially depend on categorization. Correspondingly, categorization plays a central role in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Early machine learning algorithms for categorization were inspired by psychology and neuroscience. However, today machine learning is a mature field and more recent methods are usually seen to be grounded in statistics rather than in cognitive science. Kernel methods, in particular, have gained popularity in machine learning and have proved to be successful in many applied categorization problems. I will describe how similar ideas have developed in psychology and how insights from machine learning could feed back into cognitive science.