The Goldilocks Effect: Infants' preference for stimuli that are neither too predictable nor too surprising
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Even before birth, infants attend to the statistical properties of their sensory environments to learn about events in world. Tracking these statistics is crucial to mastery of visual, social, linguistic, and cognitive tasks. However, the degree to which their sampling follows prescriptions of rational statistical infer-ence is unclear. Do infants ’ attentional preferences reflect ef-ficient information gathering? We investigated using an ideal observer model (a Markov Dirichlet-multinomial). We pre-dicted infants ’ attention to sequential events would be moder-ated by information content. We tested infants (7-8 months) with 32 unique event sequences (objects popping out of boxes) on a Tobii eye-tracker. Each sequence continued until look-away. Controlling for other variables, we found infants were significantly more likely to look away at either highly informa-tive or uninformative events according to the model. This sug-gests infants allocate visual attention to maintain intermediate rates of information processing, avoiding committing cogni-tive resources to either overly predictable or surprising events. This “Goldilocks effect ” may reflect a general strategy for ef-ficient learning from environmental statistics.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W60304469