Abstract
We present an approach to the study of cognitive phenomena by using evolutionary computation. To this end we use a spatial, developmental, neuroevolution system. We use our system to evolve ANNs to perform simple abstractions of the cognitive tasks of color perception and color reading. We define these tasks to explore the nature of the Stroop effect. We show that we can evolve it to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, and also that evolved networks exhibit complex interference behavior when dealing with multiple tasks and incongruent data. We also show that this interference behavior can be manipulated by changing the learning parameters, a method that we successfully use to create a Stroop like interference pattern.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement number 295644.
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Benbassat, A., Henik, A. (2016). Replicating the Stroop Effect Using a Developmental Spatial Neuroevolution System. In: Handl, J., Hart, E., Lewis, P., López-Ibáñez, M., Ochoa, G., Paechter, B. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV. PPSN 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9921. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_56
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