Algorithms of adaptation in inductive inference

We investigate the idea that human concept inference utilizes local adaptive search within a compositional mental theory space. To explore this, we study human judgments in a challenging task that involves actively gathering evidence about a symbolic rule governing the behavior of a simulated environment. Participants learn by performing mini-experiments before making generalizations and explicit guesses about a hidden rule. They then collect additional evidence themselves (Experiment 1) or observe evidence gathered by someone else (Experiment 2) before revising their own generalizations and guesses. In each case, we focus on the relationship between participants’ initial and revised guesses about the hidden rule concept. We find an order effect whereby revised guesses are anchored to idiosyncratic elements of the earlier guess. To explain this pattern, we develop a family of process accounts that combine program induction ideas with local (MCMC-like) adaptation mechanisms. A particularly local variant of this adaptive account captures participants’ hypothesis revisions better than a range of alternative explanations. We take this as suggestive that people deal with the inherent complexity of concept inference partly through use of local adaptive search in a latent compositional theory space.