Understanding the development of intelligence in a human infant is a key project of CBMM. This project engages the fundamental tradeoff between nature and nurture, or priors and data, and ultimately the origin of priors—how constraints are selected by evolution, encoded in genes, and instantiated in genetically wired brain circuits.
This project also represents a novel developmental approach to building human-like artificial intelligence systems and comprehensive computational models of human cognitive architecture. Instead of branching out from a single area of adult human intelligence, we start with an integrated cognitive model of multiple core capacities in the young child’s mind, along with a set of developmental or learning mechanisms for scaling up to an adult model.
People can report, beforing seeing or hearing something, how well they might be able to identify it -- telling the difference between 2 or 8 marbles shaken in a box is easier than doing the same with 6 or 8. This project studies this ability with young children, as well as what implications we can draw for theories of perceptual and conceptual representation.
