Researchers at the University of
Iowa have documented an activity by infants that begins nearly from birth: They
learn by taking inventory of the things they see.
In a new paper, the psychologists contend that infants create knowledge by
looking at and learning about their surroundings. The activities should be
viewed as intertwined, rather than considered separately, to fully appreciate
how infants gain knowledge and how that knowledge is seared into memory.
"The link between looking
and learning is much more intricate than what people have assumed," says
John Spencer, a psychology professor at the UI and a co-author on the paper
published in the journal Cognitive Science.
The researchers created a mathematical model that
mimics, in real time and through months of child development, how infants use
looking to understand their environment. Such a model is important because it
validates the importance of looking to learning and to forming memories. It
also can be adapted by child development specialists to help special-needs
children and infants born prematurely to combine looking and learning more
effectively.
"The model can look, like
infants, at a world that includes dynamic, stimulating events that influence
where it looks. We contend (the model) provides a critical link to studying how social partners influence
how infants distribute their looks, learn, and develop," the authors write.
The model examines the
looking-learning behavior of infants as young as 6 weeks through one year of
age, through 4,800 simulations at various points in development involving
multiple stimuli and tasks. As
would be expected, most infants introduced to new objects tend to look at them
to gather information about them; once they do, they are "biased" to
look away from them in search of something new. In other words, an infant will
linger on something that's being shown to it for the first time as it learns
about it, and that the "total looking time" will decrease as the
infant becomes more familiar with it.
But the researchers found that
infants who don't spend a sufficient amount of time studying a new object—in
effect, failing to learn about it and to catalog that knowledge into
memory—don't catch on as well, which can affect their learning later on.
"Infants need to dwell on
things for a while to learn about them," says Sammy Perone, a
post-doctoral researcher in psychology at the UI and corresponding author on
the paper.
To examine why infants need to
dwell on objects to learn about them, the researchers created two different
models. One model learned in a "responsive" world: Every time the
model looked away from a new object, the object was jiggled to get the model to
look at it again. The other model learned in a "nonresponsive" world:
when this model looked at a new object, objects elsewhere were jiggled to
distract it. The results showed that the responsive models"learned about
new objects more robustly, more quickly, and are better learners in the
end," says Perone, who earned his doctorate at the UI in 2010.
The model captures infant looking
and learning as young as 6 weeks. Even at that age, the UI researchers were
able to document that infants can familiarize themselves with new objects, and
store them into memory well enough that when shown them again, they quickly
recognized them.
"To our knowledge, these are
the first quantitative simulations of looking data from infants this
young," the authors write.
The results underscore the notion
that looking is a critical entry point into the cognitive processes in the
brain that begin in children nearly from birth. And, "if that's the case,
we can manipulate and change what the brain is doing" to aid infants born
prematurely or who have special needs, Perone adds.
"The promise of a model that
implements looking as an active behavior is that it might explain and predict
how specific manipulations of looking over time will impact subsequent
learning," the researchers write.
Provided by University of Iowa
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