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      The Goldilocks Effect: Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex

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          Abstract

          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.

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          Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants.

          Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.
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            The principles of psychology, Vol I.

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              Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults.

              Previous research suggests that language learners can detect and use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to discover words in continuous speech (e.g. Aslin, R.N., Saffran, J.R., Newport, E.L., 1998. Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science 9, 321-324; Saffran, J.R., Aslin, R.N., Newport, E.L., 1996. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J., R., Newport, E.L., Aslin, R.N., (1996). Word segmentation: the role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 606-621; Saffran, J.R., Newport, E.L., Aslin, R.N., Tunick, R.A., Barrueco, S., 1997. Incidental language learning: Listening (and learning) out of the corner of your ear. Psychological Science 8, 101-195). In the present research, we asked whether this statistical learning ability is uniquely tied to linguistic materials. Subjects were exposed to continuous non-linguistic auditory sequences whose elements were organized into 'tone words'. As in our previous studies, statistical information was the only word boundary cue available to learners. Both adults and 8-month-old infants succeeded at segmenting the tone stream, with performance indistinguishable from that obtained with syllable streams. These results suggest that a learning mechanism previously shown to be involved in word segmentation can also be used to segment sequences of non-linguistic stimuli.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2012
                23 May 2012
                : 7
                : 5
                : e36399
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America
                [2 ]Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America
                University of Barcelona, Spain
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: CK STP RNA. Performed the experiments: CK. Analyzed the data: CK STP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: CK STP RN. Wrote the paper: CK STP RN.

                Article
                PONE-D-11-24980
                10.1371/journal.pone.0036399
                3359326
                22649492
                71cda612-f396-49a7-90cb-1d1ec24d6b16
                Kidd et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 13 December 2011
                : 5 April 2012
                Page count
                Pages: 8
                Categories
                Research Article
                Medicine
                Pediatrics
                Developmental and Pediatric Neurology
                Social and Behavioral Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Attention (Behavior)
                Cognitive Psychology
                Learning
                Memory
                Reasoning
                Developmental Psychology
                Experimental Psychology

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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