  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.
