Babies and their minds
Babies are unique creatures. Despite their very young age, they understand the basic rules of the physical world like the fact that objects cannot 'teleport' from one area to another. Now an international team of scientists has taken their exceptionality even further, showing how babies have the ability to form sophisticated expectations of how new situations develop. The study, published in the journal Science, was funded in part by the Marie Curie Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self (DISCOS) Research Training Network, under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). A computational model of infant cognition was devised, giving researchers the means to accurately predict infants' surprise at events that disturb their conception of how the physical world works. Based on this tool, a type of intelligence - that experts define as pure reasoning - is simulated, thus enabling researchers to calculate the probability of a specific event, given the information about the behaviour of objects. Joshua B. Tenenbaum, one of the authors of the study from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, says the team found a close correlation between the model's predictions and the actual responses of infants to such events. So, yes, infants reason in a similar way, the team found. 'Real intelligence is about finding yourself in situations that you've never been in before but that have some abstract principles in common with your experience, and using that abstract knowledge to reason productively in the new situation,' Professor Tenenbaum explains. The findings of this study add weight to recent research efforts seeking to 'reverse-engineer' infant cognition by investigating babies at ages 3-, 6- and 12-months, to determine what they know about the physical and social world. The computational model used in this study is referred to as the 'ideal-observer model'. Researchers predict the length of time infants look at animated scenarios; these scenarios were in general consistent with what they know of the behaviour of objects. For instance, coloured objects were presented to the 12-month-old babies: 3 blue and 1 red. These objects bounced around a container. The team covered the scene after some time, and one of the objects would leave the container through an opening. Infants would be surprised if one of the objects farthest from the exit had exited the container if the scene was blocked for only 0.04 seconds. A 2.0-second block made the scene lose some of its lustre, and the babies were surprised only if the rare (red) object left first. On the whole, the team found that the exit, the number of exited objects and the distance mattered to the babies when the blocking time was at the half-way mark. So the model gives an accurate prediction of how long babies would look at the same exit under various scenarios, object numbers, spatial position and time delay. 'We don't yet have a unified theory of how cognition works, but we're starting to make progress on describing core aspects of cognition that previously were only described intuitively,' Professor Tenenbaum says. 'Now we're describing them mathematically.' Researchers from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the University IUAV of Venice in Italy, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, as well as the University of California, San Diego in the United States contributed to this study.For more information, please visit:Science:http://www.sciencemag.org/CORDIS Marie Curie Actions:http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/mariecurieactions/home_en.htmlMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):http://web.mit.edu/
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