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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2012-05, Vol.7 (5), p.e36399-e36399
Main Authors: Kidd, Celeste, Piantadosi, Steven T, Aslin, Richard N
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Attention
Attention - physiology
Babies
Child Development - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Communication
Complexity
Computer applications
Humans
Hypotheses
Infant
Infants
Information processing
Learning - physiology
Linguistics
Medical imaging
Medicine
Photic Stimulation
Regression Analysis
Researchers
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Stimulus salience
Survival analysis
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0036399