The study suggests that the monkeys create internal representations and assumptions about how to solve a puzzle or address a task that supersede the usual drivers of lab behavior, such as rewards. Even when the puzzle at hand was impossible by design.
DAN ROBITZSKI: Faced with an impossible puzzle, lab monkeys in a recent experiment showed unflappable resolve: They continued to guess what they thought must be the correct responses, even when rewards were doled out at random or in ways meant to disincentivize the animals from sticking to their guns. In short, the monkeys’ spuriously learned convictions—their seeming insistence that there must be a structure and solution to an unsolvable puzzle—outweighed their desire to maximize rewards during the experiment.
The study… suggests that the monkeys create internal representations and assumptions about how to solve a puzzle or address a task that supersede the usual drivers of lab behavior, such as rewards. And even when the puzzle at hand was impossible by design, that internally conjured structure kept the animals guessing long after the Columbia University researchers behind the experiment thought they’d give up. The study suggests that the monkeys did not distinguish between learnable and unlearnable tasks, treating the latter as they had the former — a tendency that the study’s authors say resembles how humans approach random or impossible challenges.
The original goal of the study was to learn more about the motivations behind learning and exploration, explains coauthor Jacqueline Gottlieb, a Columbia University neuroscientist. “The main reward for exploration is finding some sort of pattern or regularity in the world. The problem is that we live in a very complicated world with a lot of patterns [that] might be valid—and a lot of them are nonsense”…
Gottlieb says she expected that the animals would monitor their own learning rates, determining how well they were performing based on how often they received a reward. Instead, they seemed to develop an intrinsic reward that kept them focused on attempting to solve the puzzle instead of gaming the task. It’s “very motivating when you believe there is a pattern and you believe you are getting it,” she says.
A similar phenomenon has been observed in humans. In a study Gottlieb and her colleagues published in Nature Communications last year, for example, people tried to complete a similar unlearnable puzzle (disguised among three solvable ones). Many of the research participants were drawn to the challenge of the impossible task, she says, and some said they were confident they could have solved it if they’d only had more time…
Yael Niv, a Princeton University neuroscientist… says the brain has a tendency to look for patterns and structure even when there are none. “One idea [for why this occurs] is that in order to figure out true relationships out there in the world, we have to assume they exist”…
“We as animals want there to be patterns to the world; we want to be able to learn our environment,” learning and memory researcher Natalie Odynocki, who didn’t work on the study, tells The Scientist over email. In this case, “The monkeys are taking what they have previously learned will give them reward and applying this learning to a new context”. SOURCE…
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