Teaching Recombinable Motifs Through Simple Examples

TL;DR

This paper explores how teachers use simple examples to teach abstract concepts, finding that simplicity helps learners grasp underlying patterns better.

Contribution

The study introduces a pedagogical sampling model that explains how teachers select simpler examples to improve learning outcomes.

Findings

Human teachers create simpler necklaces to teach motifs, which are easier for learners to interpret.

Learners perform better when taught by human teachers compared to model-generated examples.

Simpler examples lead to better recovery of underlying motifs by learners.

Abstract

A hallmark of effective teaching is that it grants learners not just a collection of facts about the world, but also a toolkit of abstractions that can be applied to solve new problems. How do humans teach abstractions from examples? Here, we applied Bayesian models of pedagogy to a necklace‐building task where teachers create necklaces to teach a learner “motifs” that can be flexibly recombined to create new necklaces. In Experiment 1 (N = 151), we find that human teachers produce necklaces that are simpler (i.e., have lower algorithmic complexity) than would be expected by chance, as indexed by a model that samples uniformly from all necklaces that contain the target motifs. This tendency to select simpler examples is captured by a pedagogical sampling model that tries to maximize the learner's belief in the true motifs by prioritizing examples that have fewer alternative interpretations. In Experiment 2 (N = 295), we find that simplicity is beneficial. Human learners recover the underlying motifs better when teachers produce simpler sequences, as predicted by the pedagogical sampling model. However, humans learn best from human teachers rather than from model‐generated examples, which suggests that human teachers have additional expectations about how learners will interpret examples that are not captured by standard models of teaching. Our work provides a principled framework to understand when and why teachers use simple examples to convey abstract knowledge.

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