Related papers: Discovering containment: from infants to machines
Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they…
Object concepts play a foundational role in human visual cognition, enabling perception, memory, and interaction in the physical world. Inspired by findings in developmental neuroscience - where infants are shown to acquire object…
Within months of birth, children develop meaningful expectations about the world around them. How much of this early knowledge can be explained through generic learning mechanisms applied to sensory data, and how much of it requires more…
Understanding infant development is one of the greatest scientific challenges of contemporary science. A large source of difficulty comes from the fact that the development of skills in infants results from the interactions of multiple…
Children's cognitive abilities are sometimes cited as AI benchmarks. How can the most common 1,000 concepts (89\% of everyday use) be learnt in a naturalistic children's setting? Cognitive development in children is about quality, and new…
Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to replicate some of these abilities with a neural network that…
The recent successful deep neural networks are largely trained in a supervised manner. It {\it associates} complex patterns of input samples with neurons in the last layer, which form representations of {\it concepts}. In spite of their…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
One-year-old infants rapidly form and generalize categories of the everyday objects they encounter. Here we provide evidence on infants daily-life visual experiences for 8 early-learned object categories. Using a corpus of infant…
The ability to understand and manipulate numbers and quantities emerges during childhood, but the mechanism through which humans acquire and develop this ability is still poorly understood. We explore this question through a model, assuming…
As artificial intelligence (AI) advances in reasoning capabilities, most recently with the emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), understanding how children conceptualize AI's reasoning processes becomes critical for fostering AI…
One of the inherent limitations of current AI systems, stemming from the passive learning mechanisms (e.g., supervised learning), is that they perform well on labeled datasets but cannot deduce knowledge on their own. To tackle this…
This study investigates how learners organize perceptual space in early phonetic acquisition by advancing previous studies in two key aspects. Firstly, it examines the shape of the learned hidden representation as well as its ability to…
Human intelligence and human consciousness emerge gradually during the process of cognitive development. Understanding this development is an essential aspect of understanding the human mind and may facilitate the construction of artificial…
We guess humans start acquiring grasping skills as early as at the infant stage by virtue of two key processes. First, infants attempt to learn grasps for known objects by imitating humans. Secondly, knowledge acquired during this process…
Humans rarely perceive objects in isolation but interpret scenes through relationships among co-occurring elements. How such contextual knowledge is acquired without explicit supervision remains unclear. Here we combine human psychophysics…
The young infant explores its body, its sensorimotor system, and the immediately accessible parts of its environment, over the course of a few months creating a model of peripersonal space useful for reaching and grasping objects around it.…
While current deep learning models achieve high performance by learning statistical correlations from vast datasets,which stands in stark contrast to human learning. They lack the flexibility of humans-particularly preverbal infants-to…
While human infants exhibit knowledge about object permanence from two months of age onwards, deep-learning approaches still largely fail to recognize objects' continued existence. We introduce a slot-based autoregressive deep learning…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…