The Goldilocks effect: human infants allocate attention to visual sequences that are neither too simple nor too complex.

Human infants, like immature members of any species, must be highly selective in sampling information from their environment to learn efficiently. Failure to be selective would waste precious computational resources on material that is already known (too simple) or unknowable (too complex). In two e...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Celeste Kidd, Steven T Piantadosi, Richard N Aslin
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2012
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/e034737ef6504081ad7ba7e3a5a918d6
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Human infants, like immature members of any species, must be highly selective in sampling information from their environment to learn efficiently. Failure to be selective would waste precious computational resources on material that is already known (too simple) or unknowable (too complex). In two experiments with 7- and 8-month-olds, we measure infants' visual attention to sequences of events varying in complexity, as determined by an ideal learner model. Infants' probability of looking away was greatest on stimulus items whose complexity (negative log probability) according to the model was either very low or very high. These results suggest a principle of infant attention that may have broad applicability: infants implicitly seek to maintain intermediate rates of information absorption and avoid wasting cognitive resources on overly simple or overly complex events.