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Generalization and Interference in Human Motor Control

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Computational and Robotic Models of the Hierarchical Organization of Behavior

Abstract

Humans (and robots) interacting with the environment have to deal with a continuous stream of sensory inputs in an incremental fashion. Such systems face two fundamental issues: (1) they must acquire new skills in a cumulative fashion, that is exploiting previous knowledge to learn new behaviors, and (2) they must avoid the so-called catastrophic interference, where learning new knowledge destroys existing memories. Here, we analyze the problem from the perspective of biological motor control. We first review experimental results of consolidation of procedural memories and the factors affecting it. Then the problem of generalization and interference is examined together with some interpretations in terms of computational models. Finally, we present some possible approaches to the issue of learning multiple tasks while avoiding catastrophic interference in bio-inspired learning architectures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The policies and the outcomes may be complex. For example, the outcomes may actually be sequences of elementary observations, while the policies may be made up of sequences of elementary actions.

  2. 2.

    A set is countable if every element of the set can be associated with a natural number. An example of countable set is the set of natural numbers \(\mathbb{N} =\{ 0, 1, 2, 3,\ldots \}\). The set \(\mathbb{R}\) of real numbers is an example of uncountable set.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Ruth-Moufang Str. 1, 60438, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Luca Lonini

  2. Chalmers University of Technology Sweden, SE-412 96, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Christos Dimitrakakis

  3. Institute of Psychology Organization: Technical University Darmstadt, Karolinenplatz 5, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Constantin Rothkopf

  4. Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Jochen Triesch

Authors
  1. Luca Lonini
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  2. Christos Dimitrakakis
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  3. Constantin Rothkopf
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  4. Jochen Triesch
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Correspondence to Luca Lonini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Rome, Italy

    Gianluca Baldassarre

  2. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Rome, Italy

    Marco Mirolli

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Lonini, L., Dimitrakakis, C., Rothkopf, C., Triesch, J. (2013). Generalization and Interference in Human Motor Control. In: Baldassarre, G., Mirolli, M. (eds) Computational and Robotic Models of the Hierarchical Organization of Behavior. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39875-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39875-9_8

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