Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans not only can effortlessly imagine a wide range ofnovel instances and scenarios when prompted (e.g., a newshirt), but more remarkably, they can adequately generate ex-amples which satisfy a given set of constraints (e.g., a new,dotted, pink shirt). Recently, Nobandegani and Shultz (2017)proposed a framework which permits converting deterministic,discriminative neural nets into probabilistic generative models.In this work, we formally show that an extension of this frame-work allows for generating examples under a wide range ofconstraints. Furthermore, we show that this framework is con-sistent with developmental findings on children’s generativeabilities, and can account for a developmental shift in infants’probabilistic learning and reasoning. We discuss the impor-tance of integrating Bayesian and connectionist approaches tocomputational developmental psychology, and how our workcontributes to that research.