Pure reasoning in 12-month-old infants as probabilistic inference

Erno Téglás, Edward Vul, Vittorio Girotto, Michel Gonzalez, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Luca L. Bonatti

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants' looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants' statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1054-1059
Number of pages6
JournalScience
Volume332
Issue number6033
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 May 2011

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