Entropy as a global variable of the learning process

Abstract

The work reported here is a contribution to the study of a complex motor behavior, viewed globally. The question raised is the nature of the process by which an environment-sensorimotricity coupling is organized. The material is the trajectory of a constrained free climbing task, and the main concept is entropy. The entropy of the climber's trajectory is used to measure the degree of structuring in the successive states of the subject-environment system during the learning of a complex task. It will be shown that the entropy of the trajectory decreases as learning progresses, and that the shape of the entropy curve is a function of the climber's level of expertise. A model of constraint relaxation is proposed to describe the learning process. Then, based on a theory of probabilistic inference, an attemp is made to show that this natural biological process obeys the thermodynamic laws of neural networks.