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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, December 03, 2010
12:50 PM
CSB 703
Celeste Kidd
University of Rochester
The Goldilocks Effect: Infants actively seek to maintain a rate of information processing that is -just right-
Infants have a lot to learn in the first few years of life, and a limited set of cognitive resources with which to do it. If infants are efficient information gatherers, they should selectively attend to stimuli from which they can learn best—that is, material that is neither too predictable (easy), nor too surprising (complex). We tested this hypothesis using ideal observer models (Markov Dirichlet-multinomials), and predicted infants’ attention to sequential events would be moderated by information content. We showed infants (7-8 months) a series unique event sequences on a Tobii eye-tracker, with each sequence continuing until the infant looked away. Controlling for other variables, we found infants were significantly more likely to look away at either highly uninformative (predictable) or highly informative (surprising) events according to the model. Our results suggest that infants allocate their attention in order to maintain intermediate rates of information processing, avoiding committing cognitive resources to either overly predictable or surprising events.