I love backpropagating ideas from ML back into psychology :) I think it shows great promise as a way to sidestep the ethical concerns (and the reproducibility

I love backpropagating ideas from ML back into psychology :) I think it shows great promise as a way to sidestep the ethical concerns (and the reproducibility issues) associated with traditional psychology research. One idea in this space I think a lot about is from the Google paper on curiosity and procrastination in reinforcement learning: https://research.google/blog/curiosity-and-procrastination-in-reinforcement-learning/ https://research.google/blog/curiosity-and-procrastination-i... Basically the idea is that you can model curiosity as a reward signal proportional to your prediction error. They do an experiment where they train an ML system to explore a maze using curiosity, and it performs the task more efficiently -- UNTIL they add a "screen" in the maze that shows random images. In this case, the agent maximizes the curiosity reward by just staring at the screen. Feels a little too relatable sometimes, as a highly curious person with procrastination issues :)