Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent engineering considerations have prompted an improvement to the least mean squares (LMS) learning rule for training one-layer adaptive networks; incorporating a dynamically modifiable learning rate for each associative weight accellerates overall learning and provides a mechanism for adjusting the salience of individual cues (Sutton, 1992a,b). Prior research has established that the standard L M S rule can characterize aspects of animal learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) and human category learning (Gluck & Bower, 1988a,b). W e illustrate here how this enhanced L M S rule is analogous to adding a cue-salience or attentional component to the psychological model, giving the network model a means for discriminating between relevant and irrelevant cues. W e then demonstrate the effectiveness of this enhanced L M S rule for modeling human performance in two non-stationary learning tasks for which the standard L M S network model fails to adequately account for the data (Hurwitz, 1990; Gluck, Glauthier, & Sutton, in preparation).