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Abstract:
Compositionality is an important and yet poorly understood feature of human behaviour. In this study, participants navigated mazes with hidden, compositional structure, which were generated using operations over spatial primitives. Although they were not informed about the underlying structure, participants improved their accuracy and decreased primitive-inconsistent actions over the course of the task. Participants also selectively tested hypothesis corresponding to compositionally simpler expectations (simplicity bias), with a large proportion of errors due to expecting greater compositional structure than present in the true path. However, this simplicity bias did not change over the course of the experiment, and remained robust throughout. These results suggest that the human bias towards simplicity is unaffected by experience with compositional structure, at least in the time-frame of our experiment.
