Infants Segment Continuous Events Using Transitional Probabilities

Stahl, Aimee E.; Romberg, Alexa R.; Roseberry, Sarah; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathryn

doi:10.1111/cdev.12247

Cited by 96 publications

(67 citation statements)

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“…Children discriminate between the improbable and the impossible in fictional stories (Weisberg & Sobel, 2012; but see Shtulman, 2009; Shtulman & Carey, 2007), and even young infants can use probabilistic information to make inferences about whether outcomes are statistically likely or unlikely (Téglás & Bonatti, 2016; Téglás, Girotto, Gonzalez, & Bonatti, 2007; Téglás et al, 2011; Xu & Denison, 2009; Xu & Garcia, 2008). Infants can also track auditory and visual statistical patterns (e.g., Saffran et al, 1996; Stahl et al, 2014) and are sensitive to the degree to which those patterns are surprising (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012, 2014). It is not yet known whether the degree of children’s surprise parametrically affects learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, in addition to violations of core knowledge (which are in place prior to the experimental session), infants detect violations to associative expectations acquired on-line over the course of a laboratory task. Infants not only look longer when these associative expectations are violated (e.g., Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996; Stahl, Romberg, Roseberry, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2014), but also exhibit differential brain responses to events they have recently established as surprising (Emberson, Richards, & Aslin, 2015; Kouider et al, 2015). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Stahl

Feigenson

2017

Cognition

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Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children’s learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children’s ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children’s learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children’s learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge – and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge – shapes new learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Stahl

Feigenson

2017

Cognition

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“…And does this sensitivity to either single dimensions or feature chunks change across development? For example, both adults and infants track the statistics of human action sequences (Baldwin et al 2008, Monroy et al 2017, Stahl et al 2014). One can imagine that, in this situation, the details of each visual element would not only be less important than the gestalt of the action being performed, but would also be a distraction from the task at hand.…”

Section: Statistics Of What? the Primitives Over Which Statistics mentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant Statistical Learning

Saffran

Kirkham

2018

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

333

211

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Perception involves making sense of a dynamic, multimodal environment. In the absence of mechanisms capable of exploiting the statistical patterns in the natural world, infants would face an insurmountable computational problem. Infant statistical learning mechanisms facilitate the detection of structure. These abilities allow the infant to compute across elements in their environmental input, extracting patterns for further processing and subsequent learning. In this selective review, we summarize findings that show that statistical learning is both a broad and flexible mechanism (supporting learning from different modalities across many different content areas) and input specific (shifting computations depending on the type of input and goal of learning). We suggest that statistical learning not only provides a framework for studying language development and object knowledge in constrained laboratory settings, but also allows researchers to tackle real-world problems, such as multilingualism, the role of ever-changing learning environments, and differential developmental trajectories.

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“…Similarly, younger infants, 6- and 8-month-olds, can detect a salient target action in a continuous action sequence (Hespos, Saylor, & Grossman, 2009). There is also evidence that 7- to 9-month-old infants can segment continuous events using transitional probabilities (Roseberry, Richie, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Shipley, 2011; Stahl, Romberg, Roseberry, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2014). Furthermore, studies show that salient action effects help parse continuous action into individual actions for 9- to 12-month-old infants (Elsner, Hauf, & Aschersleben, 2007; Verschoor, Paulus, Spape, Biro, & Hommel, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

Prelinguistic foundations of verb learning: Infants discriminate and categorize dynamic human actions

Song

Pruden

Golinkoff

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Action categorization is necessary for human cognition and foundational to learning verbs, which label categories of actions and events. In two studies using a nonlinguistic preferential looking paradigm, 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants were tested on their ability to discriminate and categorize a dynamic, human manner of motion (i.e., way in which a figure moves; e.g., marching). Study 1 results reveal that infants can discriminate a change in path and actor across instances of the same manner of motion. Study 2 results suggest that infants categorize the manner of motion for dynamic human events, even under conditions in which other components of the event change, including the actor’s path and the actor. Together, these two studies extend prior research on infant action categorization of animated motion events by providing evidence that infants can categorize dynamic human actions, a skill foundational to the learning of motion verbs.

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Infants Segment Continuous Events Using Transitional Probabilities

Cited by 96 publications

References 50 publications

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Infant Statistical Learning

Prelinguistic foundations of verb learning: Infants discriminate and categorize dynamic human actions

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