Infants avoid ‘labouring in vain’ by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns

Abstract

Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spurious patterns, and attempting to learn the latter costs time and resources with no advantage to the learner. Thus, an efficient learner in a complex environment needs to devote more attention to input that reflects a real and learnable pattern than to input that reflects a spurious or ultimately unlearnable pattern. However, in order to achieve such efficiency in the absence of external feedback, learners need to have an implicit metric of their own learning progress. Do human infants have such a metric? Data from two experiments demonstrate that 17-month-olds attend longer to learnable vs. unlearnable linguistic grammars, taking more trials to habituate and more overall time to habituate for grammars in which a valid generalization over input stimuli can be made. These data provide the first evidence that infants have an implicit metric of their own learning progress and preferentially direct their attention to learnable aspects of their environment.

Examining implicit metacognition in 3.5-year-old children: an eye-tracking and pupillometric study

“…The findings provide some evidence for implicit metacognitive skills in 3.5-year-old children. It converges with recent behavioral evidence (Balcomb and Gerken, 2008; Gerken et al, 2011; Lyons and Ghetti, 2013) that implicit signs of metacognitive monitoring might precede their explicit manifestations in verbal tasks.…”

“…Motivated by recent findings in the animal literature (e.g., Hampton, 2001; Smith et al, 2003; Kornell et al, 2007; Call, 2010), developmental researchers have started to examine the implicit signs/precursors of metacognitive abilities in younger children (e.g., Call and Carpenter, 2001; Balcomb and Gerken, 2008; Gerken et al, 2011). Balcomb and Gerken (2008), for example, relied on an opt-out paradigm to examine early signs of implicit metamemory in preschool children.…”

Infants’ Learning of Phonological Status

“…Recent artificial grammar learning work suggests that infants tend to attend more to regular, neither entirely predictable nor entirely unpredictable, patterns (Gerken et al, 2011). In the domain of allophonic learning this might translate to different attention being allotted to patterns that are halfway between allophones and phonemes because of their very irregularity, a matter that could be investigated by assessing infants’ acquisition of different types of phonemes/allophones.…”

Expectancy Learning from Probabilistic Input by Infants

“…Infants are surprised by event outcomes that are statistically unlikely, such as when several red objects are randomly selected from a container in which white objects vastly outnumber red objects (Xu and Garcia, 2008; Téglás et al, 2011). Infants also are most likely to maintain attention to a visual sequence when the sequence is neither too predictable nor too unpredictable (Haith et al, 1969; Collins et al, 1972; Kidd et al, 2012) and attend more to language input that has learnable structure than structure that is unlearnable (Gerken et al, 2011). This work implies that infants readily attend to (and learn from) probabilistic input as long as it is not too irregular and contains some useable structure.…”