Something to pique your curiosity (with Gert Westermann)

In the first half of this episode, Jenny and I chat with Dr. Gert Westermann about his rather circuitous journey in cognitive science as well as about the role of modeling in the cognitive sciences and an early encounter with nativism in a language class. In the second half, we talk about how curiosity might develop. We center the discussion on a somewhat recent paper, which was led by his then postdoc Dr. Katie Twomey, in which they propose a theory of how curiosity works mechanstically. He talks about how when this proposal was implemented in a computational model, it was able to account for existing infant categorization data. This episode was such a joy to record.

Links

Twomey, K. E., & Westermann, G. (2018). Curiosity‐based learning in infants: A neurocomputational approach. Developmental science, 21(4), e12629. Link