UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

      "Evolving Computational Models to Understand Psychological Data"

            Dr. Peter Lane (University of Hertfordshire)

                    26 April 2017 (Wednesday)
                          1 pm - 2 pm

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                       Seminar Room D102

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Scientists generate a lot of data.  In psychology, there are over 1000
journals, many publishing experimental results.  Attempting to understand
all those results, more so to represent them in a coherent computational
theory, is too costly without the aid of automated techniques.  I will
describe a system to represent and discover computational models to
capture data in psychology. The system uses a Theory Representation
Language to define the space of possible models. This space is then
searched using genetic programming (GP) to discover models which best
fit the experimental data. The aim of this semi-automated system is
to analyse psychological data and develop (computational) explanations
of the underlying processes. Some of the challenges include: capturing
the psychological experiment and data in a way suitable for modelling,
controlling the kinds of models that the GP system may develop, and
interpreting the final results. I will discuss our current approach to
all three challenges, and provide results from two different examples,
including delayed-match-to-sample and visual attention.



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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk