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A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras

Infants and toddlers view the world, at a basic sensory level, in a fundamentally different way from their parents. This is largely due to biological ...

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Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Young children's visual environments are dynamic, changing moment-by-moment as children physically and visually explore spaces and objects and interact ...

Indiana University

Past research suggests that infants have powerful statistical learning abilities; however, studies of infants' visual statistical learning offer differing accounts of the developmental trajectory of and constraints on this learning. To elucidate this issue, the current study tested the hypothesis that young infants' segmentation of visual sequences depends on redundant statistical cues to segmentation. A sample of 20 2-month-olds and 20 5-month-olds observed a continuous sequence of looming shapes in which unit boundaries were defined by both transitional probability and co-occurrence frequency. Following habituation, only 5-month-olds showed evidence of statistically segmenting the sequence, looking longer to a statistically improbable shape pair than to a probable pair. These results reaffirm the power of statistical learning in infants as young as 5 months but also suggest considerable development of statistical segmentation ability between 2 and 5 months of age. Moreover, the results do not support the idea that infants' ability to segment visual sequences based on transitional probabilities and/or co-occurrence frequencies is functional at the onset of visual experience, as has been suggested previously. Rather, this type of statistical segmentation appears to be constrained by the developmental state of the learner. Factors contributing to the development of statistical segmentation ability during early infancy, including memory and attention, are discussed.

Infants' statistical learning: 2- and 5-month-olds' segmentation of continuous visual sequences.

The spacing effect refers to increased retention following learning instances that are spaced out in time compared with massed together in time. By one account, the advantages of spaced learning should be independent of task particulars and previous learning experiences given that spacing effects have been demonstrated in a variety of tasks across the lifespan. However, by another account, spaced learning should be affected by previous learning because past learning affects the memory and attention processes that form the crux of the spacing effect. The current study investigated whether individuals' learning histories affect the role of spacing in category learning. We examined the effect of spacing on 24 2- to 3.5-year-old children's learning of categories organized by properties to which children's previous learning experiences have biased them to attend (i.e., shape) and properties to which children are less biased to attend (i.e., texture and color). Spaced presentations led to significantly better learning of shape categories, but not of texture or color categories, compared with massed presentations. In addition, generalized estimating equations analyses revealed positive relations between the size of children's "shape-side" productive vocabularies and their shape category learning and between the size of children's "against-the-system" productive vocabularies and their texture category learning. These results suggest that children's attention to and memory for novel object categories are strongly related to their individual word-learning histories. Moreover, children's learned attentional biases affected the types of categories for which spacing facilitated learning. These findings highlight the importance of considering how learners' previous experiences may influence future learning.

Consider the category: The effect of spacing depends on individual learning histories.

Visual learning depends on both the algorithms and the training material. This essay considers the natural statistics of infant- and toddler-egocentric vision. These natural training sets for human visual object recognition are very different from the training data fed into machine vision systems. Rather than equal experiences with all kinds of things, toddlers experience extremely skewed distributions with many repeated occurrences of a very few things. And though highly variable when considered as a whole, individual views of things are experienced in a specific order - with slow, smooth visual changes moment-to-moment, and developmentally ordered transitions in scene content. We propose that the skewed, ordered, biased visual experiences of infants and toddlers are the training data that allow human learners to develop a way to recognize everything, both the pervasively present entities and the rarely encountered ones. The joint consideration of real-world statistics for learning by researchers of human and machine learning seems likely to bring advances in both disciplines.

A Developmental Approach to Machine Learning?

Much research has documented infants' sensitivity to statistical regularities in auditory and visual inputs, however the manner in which infants process and represent statistically defined information remains unclear. Two types of models have been proposed to account for this sensitivity: statistical models, which posit that learners represent statistical relations between elements in the input; and chunking models, which posit that learners represent statistically-coherent units of information from the input. Here, we evaluated the fit of these two types of models to behavioral data that we obtained from 8-month-old infants across four visual sequence-learning experiments. Experiments examined infants' representations of two types of structures about which statistical and chunking models make contrasting predictions: illusory sequences (Experiment 1) and embedded sequences (Experiments 2-4). In all four experiments, infants discriminated between high probability sequences and low probability part-sequences, providing strong evidence of learning. Critically, infants also discriminated between high probability sequences and statistically-matched sequences (illusory sequences in Experiment 1, embedded sequences in Experiments 2-3), suggesting that infants learned coherent chunks of elements. Experiment 4 examined the temporal nature of chunking, and demonstrated that the fate of embedded chunks depends on amount of exposure. These studies contribute important new data on infants' visual statistical learning ability, and suggest that the representations that result from infants' visual statistical learning are best captured by chunking models.

When learning goes beyond statistics: Infants represent visual sequences in terms of chunks.

How do infants learn to mentally rotate objects, to imagine them rotating through different viewpoints? One possibility is that development of infants' mental rotation (MR) is facilitated by visual and manual experience with complex objects. To evaluate this possibility, eighty 4-month-olds (40 females, 40 males) participated in an object exploration task with Velcro "sticky mittens" that allow infants too young to grasp objects themselves to nonetheless explore those objects manually as well as visually. These eighty infants also participated in a visual habituation task designed to test MR. Half the infants (Mittens First group) explored the object prior to the MR task, and the other half afterwards (Mittens Second group), to examine the role of immediate prior object experience on MR performance. We compared performance of male and female infants, but found little evidence for sex differences. However, we found an important effect of object exploration: The infants in the Mittens First group who exhibited the highest levels of spontaneous object engagement showed the strongest evidence of MR, but there were no consistent correlations between these measures for infants in the Mittens Second group. These findings suggest an important contribution from object experience to development of MR.

Lauren K. Slone

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Indiana University

A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Lauren K. Slone

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Indiana University

A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences