Psychologists are interested in developing instructional policies that boost student learning. An instructional policy specifies the manner and content of instruction. For example, in the domain of concept learning, a policy might specify the nature of exemplars chosen over a training sequence. Traditional psychological studies compare several hand-selected policies, e.g., contrasting a policy that selects only difficult-to-classify exemplars with a policy that gradually progresses over the training sequence from easy exemplars to more difficult (known as {\em fading}). We propose an alternative to the traditional methodology in which we define a parameterized space of policies and search this space to identify the optimum policy. For example, in concept learning, policies might be described by a fading function that specifies exemplar difficulty over time. We propose an experimental technique for searching policy spaces using Gaussian process surrogate-based optimization and a generative model of student performance. Instead of evaluating a few experimental conditions each with many human subjects, as the traditional methodology does, our technique evaluates many experimental conditions each with a few subjects. Even though individual subjects provide only a noisy estimate of the population mean, the optimization method allows us to determine the shape of the policy space and identify the global optimum, and is as efficient in its subject budget as a traditional A-B comparison. We evaluate the method via two behavioral studies, and suggest that the method has broad applicability to optimization problems involving humans in domains beyond the educational arena.

Psychologists have long been struck by individuals' limitations in expressing their internal sensations, impressions, and evaluations via rating scales. Instead of using an absolute scale, individuals rely on reference points from recent experience. This relativity of judgment limits the informativeness of responses on surveys, questionnaires, and evaluation forms. Fortunately, the cognitive processes that map stimuli to responses are not simply noisy, but rather are influenced by recent experience in a lawful manner. We explore techniques to remove sequential dependencies, and thereby decontaminate a series of ratings to obtain more meaningful human judgments. In our formulation, the problem is to infer latent (subjective) impressions from a sequence of stimulus labels (e.g., movie names) and responses. We describe an unsupervised approach that simultaneously recovers the impressions and parameters of a contamination model that predicts how recent judgments affect the current response. We test our iterated impression inference, or I^3, algorithm in three domains: rating the gap between dots, the desirability of a movie based on an advertisement, and the morality of an action. We demonstrate significant objective improvements in the quality of the recovered impressions.

For over half a century, psychologists have been struck by how poor people are at expressing their internal sensations, impressions, and evaluations via rating scales. When individuals make judgments, they are incapable of using an absolute rating scale, and instead rely on reference points from recent experience. This relativity of judgment limits the usefulness of responses provided by individuals to surveys, questionnaires, and evaluation forms. Fortunately, the cognitive processes that transform internal states to responses are not simply noisy, but rather are influenced by recent experience in a lawful manner. We explore techniques to remove sequential dependencies, and thereby decontaminate a series of ratings to obtain more meaningful human judgments. In our formulation, decontamination is fundamentally a problem of inferring latent states (internal sensations) which, because of the relativity of judgment, have temporal dependencies. We propose a decontamination solution using a conditional random field with constraints motivated by psychological theories of relative judgment. Our exploration of decontamination models is supported by two experiments we conducted to obtain ground-truth rating data on a simple length estimation task. Our decontamination techniques yield an over 20% reduction in the error of human judgments.

When individuals learn facts (e.g., foreign language vocabulary) over multiple study sessions, the temporal spacing of study has a significant impact on memory retention. Behavioral experiments have shown a nonmonotonic relationship between spacing and retention: short or long intervals between study sessions yield lower cued-recall accuracy than intermediate intervals. Appropriate spacing of study can double retention on educationally relevant time scales. We introduce a Multiscale Context Model (MCM) that is able to predict the influence of a particular study schedule on retention for specific material. MCMs prediction is based on empirical data characterizing forgetting of the material following a single study session. MCM is a synthesis of two existing memory models (Staddon, Chelaru, & Higa, 2002; Raaijmakers, 2003). On the surface, these models are unrelated and incompatible, but we show they share a core feature that allows them to be integrated. MCM can determine study schedules that maximize the durability of learning, and has implications for education and training. MCM can be cast either as a neural network with inputs that fluctuate over time, or as a cascade of leaky integrators. MCM is intriguingly similar to a Bayesian multiscale model of memory (Kording, Tenenbaum, Shadmehr, 2007), yet MCM is better able to account for human declarative memory.