Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0068, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Sep;14(5):972-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01046.x. Epub 2011 Jun 4.
Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spurious patterns, and attempting to learn the latter costs time and resources with no advantage to the learner. Thus, an efficient learner in a complex environment needs to devote more attention to input that reflects a real and learnable pattern than to input that reflects a spurious or ultimately unlearnable pattern. However, in order to achieve such efficiency in the absence of external feedback, learners need to have an implicit metric of their own learning progress. Do human infants have such a metric? Data from two experiments demonstrate that 17-month-olds attend longer to learnable vs. unlearnable linguistic grammars, taking more trials to habituate and more overall time to habituate for grammars in which a valid generalization over input stimuli can be made. These data provide the first evidence that infants have an implicit metric of their own learning progress and preferentially direct their attention to learnable aspects of their environment.
每个环境都包含无限的潜在特征和特征之间的关联，或模式。在一个环境中检测有效且可学习的模式对学习者是有益的，因为这样可以使新环境具有可预测性，在新环境中会出现相同或类似的模式。然而，一些特征之间明显的相关性反映了虚假模式，试图学习后者会浪费时间和资源，对学习者没有任何优势。因此，在复杂环境中，一个高效的学习者需要更多地关注反映真实和可学习模式的输入，而不是反映虚假或最终不可学习模式的输入。然而，为了在没有外部反馈的情况下实现这种效率，学习者需要有一种自己学习进度的隐含度量。人类婴儿有这样的衡量标准吗？两项实验的数据表明，17 个月大的婴儿会更长时间地关注可学习的语言语法与不可学习的语法，对于可以对输入刺激进行有效概括的语法，他们需要更多的尝试来习惯，并且需要更多的总时间来习惯。这些数据首次证明，婴儿有一种自己学习进度的隐含度量标准，并且优先将注意力集中在环境中可学习的方面。
