Infants tailor their attention to maximize learning

Poli, Francesco; Serino, G.; Mars, Rogier B.; Hunnius, Sabine

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abb5053

Cited by 73 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Accordingly, infants look longer at events (e.g., the appearance of an object from behind an occluder) when it can be characterized by medium–high predictability as opposed to very high or low predictability. This may serve to induce preference towards and longer observation of visual stimuli that maximize the chance of learning 25 as moderately predictable in contrast to highly predictable or unpredictable events can provide more new and relevant information for the infant. Another line of studies showed that infants are also able to track the degree of predictability of self-induced contingent reactions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-dependency of exchanged behaviors is a cue for agency attribution in 10-month-olds

Tauzin¹,

Gergely²

2021

Sci Rep

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Goal-directed social interactions (whether instrumental or communicative) involve co-dependent, partially predictable actions of interacting agents as social goals cannot be achieved by continuously exchanging the same, perfectly predictable, or completely random behaviors. We investigated whether 10-month-olds are sensitive to the co-dependence and degree of predictability in an interactive context where unfamiliar entities exchanged either perfectly predictable (identical), partially predictable (co-dependent), or non-predictable (random) signal sequences. We found that when—following the interactive exchanges—one of the entities turned in the direction of one of two lateral target objects, infants looked more at the indicated referent, but only in the partially predictable signals condition. This shows that infants attributed agency to the orienting entity and interpreted its turning action as a referential object-directed action. The present findings suggest that the co-dependency and partial predictability of exchanged behaviors can serve as an abstract structural cue to attribute intentional agency and recognize goal-directed social interactions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-dependency of exchanged behaviors is a cue for agency attribution in 10-month-olds

Tauzin¹,

Gergely²

2021

Sci Rep

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“…F. Baranes, Oudeyer, & Gottlieb, 2014). One recent infant study (Poli, Serino, Mars, & Hunnius, 2020) showed an association between LP and allocation of attention, but did not investigate this link in a multi-task, time-extended learning setting. Finally, our recent study presented direct evidence for adult humans' reliance on LP computation in a multitask setting with a distractor activity Ten, Kaushik, Oudeyer, & Gottlieb, 2021.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intrinsic Rewards in Human Curiosity-Driven Exploration: An Empirical Study

Ten¹,

Gottlieb²,

Oudeyer³

2021

Preprint

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Despite their apparent importance for the acquisition of full-fledged human intelligence, mechanisms of intrinsically motivated autonomous learning are poorly understood. How do humans identify useful sources of knowledge and decide which learning situations to approach in the absence of external rewards? While the recognition of this important problem has grown in psychological sciences over the recent years, an intriguing proposition for the possible mechanism comes from artificial intelligence, where efficient autonomous learning is achieved by programming agents to follow the heuristic of maximizing learning progress (LP) during exploration. In this study, we set out to examine the empirical evidence for this idea. Using computational modeling, we demonstrate that humans show signs of following LP while they freely explore and practice a set of multiple learning activities of varying difficulty, including an activity that is impossible to learn. Different approaches to operationalizing the notion of LP and their plausibility in light of empirical data are also discussed. We also show that models combining several types of intrinsic rewards fit better human exploration data than single component models considered so far in theoretical accounts.

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“…Infants' learning abilities are advanced from early in life 2,3 and possibly from birth 4,5 . However, whether infants are capable of meta-learning is still unknown.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If infants understood this structure, they could make use of it to change how they learned: By up-weighting evidence acquired early in the sequence and down-weighting evidence acquired later on, they could optimize their learning. 3 ) in which 16 sequences of cue-target pairs were shown. In each sequence, the cue consisted of a shape appearing in the middle of the screen.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eight-month-old infants meta-learn by downweighting irrelevant evidence

Poli¹,

Ghilardi²,

Mars³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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Infants learn to navigate the complexity of the physical and social world at an outstanding pace, but how they accomplish this learning is still unknown. Recent advances in human and artificial intelligence research propose that a key feature to achieve quick and efficient learning is meta-learning, the ability to make use of prior experiences to optimize how future information is acquired. Here we show that 8-month-old infants successfully engage in meta-learning within very short timespans. We developed a Bayesian model that captures how infants attribute informativity to incoming events, and how this process is optimized by the meta-parameters of their hierarchical models over the task structure. We fitted the model using infants’ gaze behaviour during a learning task. Our results reveal that infants do not simply accumulate experiences, but actively use them to generate new inductive biases that allow learning to proceed faster in the future.

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Infants tailor their attention to maximize learning

Cited by 73 publications

References 39 publications

Co-dependency of exchanged behaviors is a cue for agency attribution in 10-month-olds

Co-dependency of exchanged behaviors is a cue for agency attribution in 10-month-olds

Intrinsic Rewards in Human Curiosity-Driven Exploration: An Empirical Study

Eight-month-old infants meta-learn by downweighting irrelevant evidence

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