London SE14 6NW
UK
An exciting promise of developmental psychology is that, as a field, it can produce coherent explanations of development instead of merely describing behaviour. It is our business, as scientists, to find mechanistic explanations traceable back to their origins, as opposed to delineating behaviour at only one time slice. We must account for how infants and children build complex representations and acquire sophisticated knowledge.
One particularly compelling learning mechanism put forward in recent years is statistical learning. It has become evident that infants and young children have access to a powerful domain-general learning device: In laboratory experiments they can quickly learn statistically defined (or probabilistic) patterns in both auditory and visual domains (Fiser & Aslin, 2003; Kirkham et al., 2002; 2007; Saffran et al., 1996). Young children, as well, are quickly capable of understanding probabilistic information. This learning device, coupled with a rich and accessible environment, provides the building blocks for mature knowledge.
In this talk, I will attempt to flesh out this learning mechanism by introducing a developmental theory of multiple cue integration, outlining the effect that richer, more numerous cues, and cross-modal stimuli might have on infants’ ability to learn visual sequences and events. The theory predicts that there are several factors that will affect an infant’s ability to learn a particular sequence or set of events: The availability and coherence of multiple cues, and the age of the infant. I will present evidence that, at younger ages, infants will require a higher number of cues and a higher degree of coherence between them. At later ages, infants will be able to learn probabilistic structure from a smaller set of cues and be able to tolerate a degree of incoherence between multiple cues.
Biography
Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck. Previously: Assistant Professor at Stanford. PhD: Cornell University.
I am interested in the development of visuo-spatial understanding, cognition, and attention in infants and preschool age children. I am involved in two streams of research, one of which addresses the question of how infants learn about their visuospatial environment with regard to the statistical regularities inherent in their perceptual world, and the other of which investigates the roles of attention and memory in young children. In a current ESRC-funded project (with Professor Denis Mareschal) I am investigating how multisensory information supports (or inhibits) learning across primary school-age children. I employ several different methodologies in my research projects, using both corneal reflection eye-tracking and habituation/dishabituation with infants, executive function tasks with preschoolers/adults, and EEG/ERP recordings from infants.