Behavioral Experiments for Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting

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In this paper we explore whether the fundamental tool of experimental psychology, the behavioral experiment, has the power to generate insight not only into humans and animals, but artificial systems too.

• We apply the techniques of experimental psychology to investigating catastrophic forgetting in neural networks.
• We present a series of controlled experiments with two-layer ReLU networks, and exploratory results revealing a new understanding of the behavior of catastrophic forgetting.
• Alongside our empirical findings, we demonstrate an alternative, behavior-first approach to investigating neural network phenomena.