Interesting read on Edge : "Amazing Babies", an interview with Alison Gopnik on her research into the fantastic learning abilities of babies and young children.
Here are some fragments from this interview :
The biggest question for me is "How is it possible for children, young human beings, to learn as much as they do as quickly and as effectively as they do?" We've known for a long time that human children are the best learning machines in the universe. But it has always been like the mystery of the humming birds. We know thast they fly, but we don't know how they can possibly do it. We could say that babies learn, but we didn't know how. But now there's this really exciting confluence of work in artificial intelligence and machine learning, neuroscience and in developmental psychology, all trying to tackle this question about how children could possibly learn as much as they do.
For example, it turns out that babies and very young children already are doing statistical analyses of data, which is not something that we knew about until the last ten years. This is a really very, very new set of findings. Jenny Saffran, Elissa Newport and Dick Aslin at Rochester started it off when they discovered that infants could detect statistical patterns in nonsense syllables. Now every month there's a new study that shows that babies and young children compute conditional probabilities, that they do Bayesian reasoning, that they can take a random sample and understand the relationship between that sample and the population that it's drawn from. And children don't just detect statistical patterns, they use them to infer the causal structure of the world. They do it in much the same way that, sophisticated computers do. Or for that matter, they do it in the same way that every scientist does who looks at a pattern of statistics and doesn't just say oh that's the data pattern, but can then say oh and that data pattern tells us that the world must be this particular way.
When you actually study children, you certainly do see a lot of innate structure. But you also see this capacity for learning and transforming and changing what you think about the world and for imagining other ways that the world could be. In fact, one really crucial evolutionary fact about us, is that we have this very, very extended childhood. We have a much longer period of immaturity than any other species does. That's a fundamental evolutionary fact about us, and on the surface a puzzling one. Why make babies so helpless for so long? And why do we have to invest so much time and energy, literally, just to keep them alive?
Well, when you look across lots and lots of different species, birds and rodents and all sorts of critters, you see that that a long period of immaturity is correlated with a high degree of flexibility, intelligence and learning. Look at crows and chickens, for example. Crows get on the cover of Science using tools, and chickens end up in the soup pot, right? And crows have a much longer period of immaturity, a much longer period of dependence than chickens.
The way that evolution seems to have solved that problem is to have this kind of cognitive division of labor, so the babies and kids are really the R&D department of the human species. They're the ones that get to do the blue-sky learning, imagining thinking. And the adults are production and marketing. We can not only function effectively but we can continue to function in all these amazing new environments, totally unlike the environment in which we evolved. And we can do so just because we have this protected period when we're children and babies in which we can do all of the learning and imagining. There's really a kind of metamorphosis. It's like the difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly except it's more like the babies are the butterflies that get to flitter around and explore, and we're the caterpillars who are just humping along on our narrow adult path.
'The Philosophical Baby', by Alison Gopnik, on Amazon/The Edge Bookstore
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