Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent explanalion-based learning (EBL) models in Al allow a computer program to learn aschema by analyzing a single example. For example. GENESIS is an EBL system which learns a planschema from a single specific instance presented in a narrative. Previous learning models in both Aland psychology have required multiple examples. This paper presents experimental evidence thatpeople can learn a plan schema from a single narrative and that the learned schema agrees with thatpredicted by EBL. This evidence suggests that GENESIS, originally constructed as a machine learningsystem, can be interpreted as a psychological model of learning a complex schema from a singleexample.