Autonomous visual exploration creates developmental change in familiarity and novelty seeking behaviors

Abstract

What motivates children to radically transform themselves during early development? We addressed this question in the domain of infant visual exploration. Over the first year, infants' exploration shifts from familiarity to novelty seeking. This shift is delayed in preterm relative to term infants and is stable within individuals over the course of the first year. Laboratory tasks have shed light on the nature of this familiarity-to-novelty shift, but it is not clear what motivates the infant to change her exploratory style. We probed this by letting a Dynamic Neural Field (DNF) model of visual exploration develop itself via accumulating experience in a virtual world. We then situated it in a canonical laboratory task. Much like infants, the model exhibited a familiarity-to-novelty shift. When we manipulated the initial conditions of the model, the model's performance was developmentally delayed much like preterm infants. This delay was overcome by enhancing the model's experience during development. We also found that the model's performance was stable at the level of the individual. Our simulations indicate that novelty seeking emerges with no explicit motivational source via the accumulation of visual experience within a complex, dynamical exploratory system.

Low-Level Prenatal Lead Exposure Alters Auditory Recognition Memory in 2-Month-Old Infants: An Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) Study

“…These results are interpreted as evidence that the infants in this group showed stronger novelty preference than the infants with cord Pb ≥ 2.00 μg/dL. Perone and Spencer (2013) proposed that novelty preference provides evidence that a robust memory for the familiar stimuli has been formed and that the infants have started to learn new items. Accordingly, the results imply that those infants with cord Pb < 2.00 μg/dL had built a more robust memory of their mother's voice and had started encoding the information for a novel voice than the other infants.…”

“…We can infer that the infants in group 1 showed a preference for novel stimuli, whereas infants in group 2 had a bias toward familiar stimuli. Previous studies have shown that infants gradually shift their preference for familiarity to novelty during the first year of life (Fantz, 1964; Perone & Spencer, 2013; Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2004). Thus, the above difference between groups 1 and 2 might suggest a delay in the familiarity-novelty shift in group 2.…”

Developmental improvements in the resolution and capacity of visual working memory share a common source

“…A variant of the dynamic model presented here has been used to simulate infants’ performance in the processing speed task (Perone & Spencer, 2013, 2014). These simulations suggest that individual and developmental differences could be realized through the same type of mechanism.…”

“…These excitatory traces built up slowly with experience, which allowed for distribution across the feature dimension through varying experiences. Following this autonomous development, Perone and Spencer (2013) tested these individual “infants” (i.e., models with individual developmental histories) in the processing speed task. These simulations showed that this accumulation of experience provided the typical developmental improvements: “older” models with more experience encoded items in to memory more quickly and showed faster shift rates (cf.…”

“…Results from the Perone and Spencer (2013, 2014) simulations call into question classic notions of separability between cognitive processes, and instead highlight the need to understand how behavior arises from the underlying processes within specific task contexts. A similar demonstration can be found in Simmering’s (in press) comparison of 3- to 5-year-old children’s performance between the change detection task and an infant change-preference task designed to assess capacity (Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003).…”