Abstract:

In this talk I will elaborate on a dynamical systems perspective on learning and cognition in individuals and collectives. In particular, I will take a look at the different aspects that can be understood from the perspective of dynamics and how dynamics can arise in such systems. A fruitful area in this regard are interactions in collectives that can be phrased in the terms of evolutionary game theory and the broad dynamics arising from repeated interactions, which can be seen as learning or as evolutionary selection dynamics. This perspective offers a common view on collectives as well as on individuals at different levels and their various adaptive processes and I will present one such instance of a learning dynamics and its relation to stochastic reinforcement learning.

As a second more speculative perspective, I will motivate and present some ongoing work on visual feature attention as a dynamic process, touching on questions of its relation to other more fundamental information theoretical processes.