the goldilocks effect human infants allocate attention to visual sequences that are neither too simple nor too complex金发女孩影响人类婴儿分配注意视觉序列,既不能太简单,也不能太复杂.pdfVIP

The Goldilocks Effect: Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex 1 1 1,2 Celeste Kidd *, Steven T. Piantadosi , Richard N. Aslin 1 Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America, 2 Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America Abstract Human infants, like immature members of any species, must be highly selective in sampling information from their environment to learn efficiently. Failure to be selective would waste precious computational resources on material that is already known (too simple) or unknowable (too complex). In two experiments with 7- and 8-month-olds, we measure infants’ visual attention to sequences of events varying in complexity, as determined by an ideal learner model. Infants’ probability of looking away was greatest on stimulus items whose complexity (negative log probability) according to the model was either very low or very high. These results suggest a principle of infant attention that may have broad applicability: infants implicitly seek to maintain intermediate rates of information absorption and avoid wasting cognitive resources on overly simple or overly complex events. Citation: Kidd C, Piantadosi ST, Aslin RN (2012) The Goldilocks Effect: Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36399. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036399 Editor: Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, University of Barcelona, Spain Received December 13, 2011; Accepted April 5, 2012; Published May 23, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Kidd et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attributio