%0 Conference Proceedings %T Psycholinguistics Meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering %A Greco, Claudio %A Plank, Barbara %A Fernández, Raquel %A Bernardi, Raffaella %Y Korhonen, Anna %Y Traum, David %Y Màrquez, Lluís %S Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics %D 2019 %8 July %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Florence, Italy %F greco-etal-2019-psycholinguistics %X We study the issue of catastrophic forgetting in the context of neural multimodal approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by evidence from psycholinguistics, we devise a set of linguistically-informed VQA tasks, which differ by the types of questions involved (Wh-questions and polar questions). We test what impact task difficulty has on continual learning, and whether the order in which a child acquires question types facilitates computational models. Our results show that dramatic forgetting is at play and that task difficulty and order matter. Two well-known current continual learning methods mitigate the problem only to a limiting degree. %R 10.18653/v1/P19-1350 %U https://aclanthology.org/P19-1350 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1350 %P 3601-3605