Browsing by Subject "Cognition in infants"
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Item The constructivist learning architecture: a model of cognitive development for robust autonomous robots(2004) Chaput, Harold Henry; Kuipers, Benjamin; Miikkulainen, RistoAutonomous robots are used more and more in remote and inaccessible places where they cannot be easily repaired if damaged or improperly programmed. A system is needed that allows these robots to repair themselves by recovering gracefully from damage and adapting to unforeseen changes. Newborn infants employ such a system to adapt to a new and dynamic world by building a hierarchical representation of their environment. This model allows them to respond robustly to changes by falling back to an earlier stage of knowledge, rather than failing completely. A computational model that replicates these phenomena in infants would afford a mobile robot the same adaptability and robustness that infants have. This dissertation presents such a model, the Constructivist Learning Architecture (CLA), that builds a hierarchical knowledge base using a set of interconnected self-organizing learning modules. The dissertation then demonstrates that CLA (1) replicates current studies in infant cognitive development, (2) builds sensorimotor schemas for robot control, (3) learns a goal-directed task from delayed rewards, and (4) can fall back and recover gracefully from damage. CLA is a new approach to robot control that allows robots to recover from damage or adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment. CLA is also a new approach to cognitive modeling that can be used to better understand how people learn for their environment in infancy and adulthood.Item Development of adaptive constraints in infants' perception of form-function correlations(2004) Cashon, Cara Helen; Cohen, Leslie B.The course of infants’ cognitive development does not always follow a nonmonotonic, steadily increasing trajectory whereby improvement is defined by infants’ expanding repertoire of abilities. In some cases, for example, their range of abilities narrows with development and is seen as an adaptive process. The purpose of the present study was to gain a better understanding of infants’ developing “adaptive constraints” on their processing of correlations between the appearance and function of features on an object. Fourteen-, 16- and 18-month-old infants were tested in a habituation experiment to investigate the developmental differences in infants’ sensitivity to three correlations: (1) within-feature form-function correlation (the appearance of a particular feature on an object and its function), (2) betweenfeature form-function correlation (the appearance of a feature and the function of a different feature on the same object), and (3) form-form correlation (the appearance of the two features on the same object). Using a between-subjects design, previous research has shown that 14-month-olds are sensitive to both within- and betweenfeature correlations whereas 18-month-olds are constrained and sensitive only to the within-feature form-function correlation (Madole & Cohen, 1995). The present study included three important changes to this previous research: (1) infants were tested on a form-form correlation in addition to the two form-function correlations, (2) infants were tested using a within-subjects design rather than between-subjects, and (3) in addition to testing 14- and 18-month-olds, 16-month-olds were also studied. It was found that 18-month-olds showed sensitivity only to the withinfeature form-function correlation; whereas the 14- and 16-month-olds showed sensitivity to none of the correlations. These results are interpreted as evidence that because they are without constraints, the younger two groups of infants struggled with attending to all the information presented at once; whereas that the oldest group of infants benefited from their adaptive constraint to process only the within-feature form-function correlation. These findings have implications for our understanding of the development of constraints on infants’ processing of information as well as the methods used to study infants’ sensitivity to correlations.Item Infant attention to male faces(2003-08) Ramsey, Jennifer Lynn; Langlois, Judith H.Two experiments investigated how the cues of attractiveness, masculinity, and averageness contribute independently or jointly to elicit 6- and 12-month-old infants' attention toward male faces. In Experiment 1, infant interest in high vs. low attractive male faces depended on the masculinity of the face pair (i.e., infants looked longer at high relative to low attractive, low masculine male faces and looked longer at low relative to high attractive, medium masculine male faces), and infant interest in high vs. low masculine male faces depended on the infant's age (i.e., 12-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, looked longer at low relative to high masculine male faces). In Experiment 2, infants looked longer at low relative to high masculine male faces only when the faces within the pair differed in both masculinity and attractiveness, and female infants looked longer at a low masculine averaged male face than low attractive, high masculine male faces. Although the combined pattern of results suggested that infant interest might be directed more toward low than high masculine male faces, particularly high attractive, low masculine male faces, the face pairings within which the longer looking occurred differed across the two studies. To ensure that these somewhat different results were not due to infants' inability to discriminate among the faces used in the studies, a third study demonstrated that infants at both ages could clearly differentiate among the faces used in the first two studies. The similarity of low masculine male faces to female faces is discussed as a possible reason for infant interest in these types of faces, and methodological differences between the first two studies are discussed as possibly accounting for the slightly different pattern of results. The results have implications for the development of attractiveness and masculinity stereotypes for male faces, and how well findings from the infant face perception literature generalize from female to male faces.