Cognitive Science Colloquium - Laura Schulz
Cognitive Science Colloquium - Laura Schulz
Philosophy
Thursday, October 9, 2025 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm HJ Patterson, 2124Title: Problems of our own making: Exploration, insight, and identity.
Abstract: Work on exploration is closely tied to work on rational learning. Researchers have proposed that humans are motivated to explore variously in the face of novelty, prediction error, information gaps, opportunities for information gain, uncertainty reduction, anticipatory utility, increased empowerment, and increased rates of learning progress. Although there are important distinctions among these accounts, they are united by the idea that organisms are motivated to build more accurate models of themselves and the world. I’ve long worked in the tradition of exploratory play as rational learning and I will present some of this work. However, I will also suggest that we should take an expansive view of the kind of behavior that exploration permits. Human motivation is vastly flexible: We can want to think about and explore anything, whether or not it has any apparent social, epistemic, or instrumental value. Indeed, much of what children (and adults) do involves inventing problems we don’t (otherwise) have and incurring unnecessary costs to obtain seemingly arbitrary rewards. Second, motivation cannot be easily decoupled from cognition. I will present some new work suggesting that social goals can affect not just what we choose to think about but what we can think about. I end by speculating about the connection between cultural variability, division of labor, and distinctively human motivation.
Bio: Laura Schulz is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. She is the principal investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. Schulz is known for her work on the early childhood development of cognition, causal inference, discovery, and learning.