PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Joshua Rule
AU  - Eric Schulz
AU  - Steven T. Piantadosi
AU  - Joshua B. Tenenbaum
TI  - Learning list concepts through program induction
AID  - 10.1101/321505
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 321505
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/14/321505.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/14/321505.full
AB  - Humans master complex systems of interrelated concepts like mathematics and natural language. Previous work suggests learning these systems relies on iteratively and directly revising a language-like conceptual representation. We introduce and assess a novel concept learning paradigm called Martha’s Magical Machines that captures complex relationships between concepts. We model human concept learning in this paradigm as a search in the space of term rewriting systems, previously developed as an abstract model of computation. Our model accurately predicts that participants learn some transformations more easily than others and that they learn harder concepts more easily using a bootstrapping curriculum focused on their compositional parts. Our results suggest that term rewriting systems may be a useful model of human conceptual representations.