Bob Mottram wrote:
2009/1/15 Ronald C. Blue <ronb...@u2ai.us>:
Bayesian surprise attracts human attention http://tinyurl.com/77p9xo
In my opinion any research carried out at
universities using public money should be available to the public,
without additional charges.
Agreed.
> Sounds interesting.
Well... not so much.
This is what I have gleaned from the abstract.
The researchers demolished an old idea about attention (from the 1950s)
and pretended to test a new idea.
In fact the new idea is so well-established that everyone takes it for
granted: attention shift is driven by surprise or novelty or
unexpectedness.
Perspective:
Recall that there was once a theory that "heat" was a fluid that passed
between bodies ("caloric"). Then, that old theory was superceded by the
new idea that heat and temperature were just average molecular motion.
Now imagine that someone came along and published a paper claiming to
have "discovered" this second idea, years after it had become common
knowledge. But what you find, when you read the details, is that what
they actual did was just take a thermometer and draw a scale on the
outside of it - a completely arbitrary scale that they made up - and
then declare that BECAUSE they slapped the scale on the outside,
THEREFORE they have validated or proved or demonstrated the idea of
temperature being molecular motion, rather than the movements of caloric
fluid.
This is exactly what these people have just done with the notion of
surprise. It adds nothing useful to what we know.
If they had shown that there is a mechanism that actually computes the
bayesian probabilities, then governs the attention shift using the
results of that calculation, that would have been progress. But just
finding something that covaries with novelty is like shooting fish in a
barrel.
Of course, it's not like these are the only people making this kind of
non-progress .... ;-)
Richard Loosemore
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