PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Charley M. Wu
AU  - Eric Schulz
AU  - Mona M. Garvert
AU  - Björn Meder
AU  - Nicolas W. Schuck
TI  - Connecting conceptual and spatial search via a model of generalization
AID  - 10.1101/258665
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 258665
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/258665.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/258665.full
AB  - The idea of a “cognitive map” was originally developed to explain planning and generalization in spatial domains through a representation of inferred relationships between experiences. Recently, new research has suggested similar principles may also govern the representation of more abstract, conceptual knowledge in the brain. We test whether the search for rewards in conceptual spaces follows similar computational principles as in spatial environments. Using a within-subject design, participants searched for both spatially and conceptually correlated rewards in multi-armed bandit tasks. We use a Gaussian Process model combining generalization with an optimistic explore-exploit trade-off to capture human search decisions and judgments in both domains, and to simulate human-level performance when specified with participant parameter estimates. In line with the notion of a domain-general generalization mechanism, parameter estimates correlate across spatial and conceptual search, yet some differences emerged, with participants generalizing less and exploiting more in the conceptual domain.