Consolidation and Learning:

A Connectionist Model of Human Credit Assignment.

Chapter 2: Consolidation. Several distinct processes have been labelled consolidation over the years. This chapter reviews the consolidation literature and attempts to unify it in a common framework. While reading this, think in terms of active symbols and the Hebb learning rule, and how consolidation might be explained under such a system.

Chapter 3: Credit Assignment. Credit assignment is simply the process of learning (i.e. linking) actions and their consequences. Such consequences might occur almost immediately thereafter or even quite some time down the road. A learning organism has no a priori way of knowing which is the case. How might this issue of the time-interval between action and consequence be dealt with in the general case? What sort of solution might work particularly well in our environment?

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology

Occasionally you run across an essay or book that so perfectly frames a set of issues and is so charming that you wish you had been its writer. Braitenberg beautifully conveys how much interesting behavior can be generated by a few simple interactions.