• HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Monday, May 23, 2022
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Chemistry

The role of variability: From playing tennis to learning language

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
May 13, 2022
in Chemistry
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Variability is crucially important for learning new skills. Consider learning how to serve in tennis. Should you always practice serving from the exact same location on the court, aiming at exactly the same spot? Although practising in more variable conditions will be slower at first, it will likely make you a better tennis player at the end. This is because variability leads to better generalisation of what is learned.

An example of visual data augmentation techniques used in machine learning

Credit: Limor Raviv

Variability is crucially important for learning new skills. Consider learning how to serve in tennis. Should you always practice serving from the exact same location on the court, aiming at exactly the same spot? Although practising in more variable conditions will be slower at first, it will likely make you a better tennis player at the end. This is because variability leads to better generalisation of what is learned.

Chihuahuas and Great Danes

This principle is found in many domains, including speech perception, grammar, and learning words and categories. For instance, infants will struggle to learn the category ‘dog’ if they are only exposed to Chihuahuas, instead of many different kinds of dogs (Chihuahuas, Poodles and Great Danes).

“There are over ten different names for this basic principle!”, says MPI’s Limor Raviv, the senior investigator of the study. “Learning from less variable input is often fast, but may fail to generalise to new stimuli. But these important insights have not been unified into a single theoretical framework, which has obscured the bigger picture.”

To identify key patterns and understand the underlying principles of variability effects, Raviv and her colleagues reviewed over 150 studies on variability and generalisation across fields, including computer science, linguistics, categorization, motor learning, visual perception and formal education.

Mr. Miyagi

The researchers discovered that, across studies, the term variability can refer to at least four different kinds of variability, such as set size (e.g. the number of different examples or locations on the tennis court) and scheduling (e.g. practice schedules with different orders or time lags). “These four kinds of variability have never been directly compared—which means that we currently don’t know which is most effective for learning”, says Raviv.

The impact of variability depends on whether it is relevant to the task or not (arguably, the colour of the tennis court is not relevant to serving practice). But according to the ‘Mr. Miyagi principle’ (inspired by the 1984 classic movie Karate Kid), practicing seemingly unrelated skills (such as waxing cars) may actually benefit learning of other skills (such as martial arts).

Competing theories

But why does variability impact learning and generalisation? One theory is that more variable input can highlight which aspects of a task are relevant and which are not (colour is useful for distinguishing between lemons and limes, but not for distinguishing between cars and trucks).

Another theory is that greater variability leads to broader generalisations. This is because variability will represent the real world better, including atypical examples (such as Chihuahuas).

A third reason has to do with the way memory works: when training is variable, learners are forced to actively reconstruct their memories.

Face recognition

“Understanding the impact of variability is important for literally every aspect of our daily life. Beyond affecting the way we learn language, motor skills, and categories, it even has an impact on our social lives”, explains Raviv. “For example, face recognition is affected by whether people grew up in a small community (fewer than 1000 people) or in larger community (over 30,000 people). Exposure to fewer faces during childhood is associated with diminished face memory”.

“We hope this work will spark people’s curiosity and generate more work on the topic”, concludes Raviv. “Our paper raises a lot of open questions. For example: Is the relationship between variability and learning broadly similar across species, or are there species-specific adaptations? Can we find similar effects of variability beyond the brain, for instance in the immune system?”



Journal

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

DOI

10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.007

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

How variability shapes learning and generalization

Article Publication Date

13-May-2022

Share12Tweet7Share2ShareShareShare1

Related Posts

Watching corals breathe: The setup

Microparticles with feeling

May 23, 2022
Reducing Water Usage in Concentrated Solar Power Plants with Radiative Cooling and Cold Storage

Reducing water usage in concentrated solar power plants with radiative cooling and cold storage

May 23, 2022

Custom ‘headphones’ boost atomic radio reception 100-fold

May 23, 2022

Professor ‘makes the case’ for EFT

May 23, 2022

POPULAR NEWS

  • Weybourne Atmospheric Observatory

    Breakthrough in estimating fossil fuel CO2 emissions

    46 shares
    Share 18 Tweet 12
  • Hidden benefit: Facemasks may reduce severity of COVID-19 and pressure on health systems, researchers find

    44 shares
    Share 18 Tweet 11
  • Discovery of the one-way superconductor, thought to be impossible

    43 shares
    Share 17 Tweet 11
  • Sweet discovery could drive down inflammation, cancers and viruses

    43 shares
    Share 17 Tweet 11

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Tags

Zoology/Veterinary ScienceUniversity of WashingtonWeather/StormsVaccinesUrogenital SystemVaccineUrbanizationVirologyVehiclesVirusWeaponryViolence/Criminals

Recent Posts

  • BiCIKL Project wraps up the first year of integrating FAIR data on biodiversity
  • DeepSqueak tool identifies marine mammal calls #ASA182
  • Microparticles with feeling
  • The limits of vision: Seeing shadows in the dark
  • Contact Us

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Posting....