Non‐Bayesian Noun Generalization in 3‐ to 5‐Year‐Old Children: Probing the Role of Prior Knowledge in the Suspicious Coincidence Effect

Moser

Topics in Cognitive Science

et al. 2018

While seemingly a ubiquitous cognitive process, the precise definition and function of surprise remains elusive. Surprise is often conceptualized as being related to improbability or to contrasts with higher probability expectations. In contrast to this probabilistic view, we argue that surprising observations are those that undermine an existing model, implying an alternative causal origin. Surprises are not merely improbable events; instead, they indicate a breakdown in the model being used to quantify probability. We suggest that the heuristic people rely on to detect such anomalous events is randomness deficiency. Specifically, people experience surprise when they identify patterns where their model implies there should only be random noise. Using algorithmic information theory, we present a novel computational theory which formalizes this notion of surprise as randomness deficiency. We also present empirical evidence that people respond to randomness deficiency in their environment and use it to adjust their beliefs about the causal origins of events. The connection between this pattern-detection view of surprise and the literature on learning and interestingness is discussed.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing Patterns in Randomness: A Computational Model of Surprise

Moser

Topics in Cognitive Science

et al. 2018

“…Nonetheless, there are also studies in which children were documented to form narrower generalizations than adults or where older children were less narrow‐minded than younger children (e.g., Rabi & Minda, , for visual patterns; Boyd & Goldberg, , and Savage, Lieven, Theakston, & Tomasello, , for syntactic constructions; Jenkins, Samuelson, Smith, & Spencer, , for semantic categories). This suggests that children are not always more open‐minded than adults, and it raises the question of when they are more open‐minded.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Learning of Intonation Contour Categories in Adults and 9‐ to 11‐Year‐Old Children: Adults Are More Narrow‐Minded

2016

We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: previously encountered and novel exemplars are categorized together equally often, as long as distance from the prototype is controlled. However, age-related differences in categorization performance also exist. Given the same experience, adults form narrower categories than children. In addition, adults pay more attention to the end of the contour while children appear to pay equal attention to the beginning and the end. The age range we examine appears to capture the tail-end of the developmental trajectory for learning intonation contour categories: there is a continuous effect of age on category breadth within the child group, but the oldest children (older than 10;3) are adult-like.

“…Note that the behavior of the model could be different (but not necessarily more accurate) if we used results of children’s clustering with children (cf. Jenkins, Samuelson, Smith, & Spencer, 2015). …”

Section: Experiments 1: Animal Listsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An associative account of the development of word learning

Sloutsky

Yim

Yao

et al. 2017

Cognitive Psychology

Word learning is a notoriously difficult induction problem because meaning is underdetermined by positive examples. How do children solve this problem? Some have argued that word learning is achieved by means of inference: young word learners rely on a number of assumptions that reduce the overall hypothesis space by favoring some meanings over others. However, these approaches have difficulty explaining how words are learned from conversations or text, without pointing or explicit instruction. In this research, we propose an associative mechanism that can account for such learning. In a series of experiments, 4-year-olds and adults were presented with sets of words that included a single nonsense word (e.g. dax). Some lists were taxonomic (i.,e., all items were members of a given category), some were associative (i.e., all items were associates of a given category, but not members), and some were mixed. Participants were asked to indicate whether the nonsense word was an animal or an artifact. Adults exhibited evidence of learning when lists consisted of either associatively or taxonomically related items. In contrast, children exhibited evidence of word learning only when lists consisted of associatively related items. These results present challenges to several extant models of word learning, and a new model based on the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations is proposed.