Werchan Denise M, Amso Dima
Department of Population Health, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Dev Sci. 2021 Sep;24(5):e13088. doi: 10.1111/desc.13088. Epub 2021 Feb 24.
Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially in cluttered naturalistic environments, there are an abundance of potential cues that can be used to structure learning into hierarchical rule structures. It is unclear how infants determine what features constitute a higher-order context to organize inputs into hierarchical rule structures. Here, we examine whether 9-month-old infants are biased to use social stimuli, relative to non-social stimuli, as a higher-order context to organize learning of simple visuospatial inputs into hierarchical rule sets. Infants were presented with four face/color-target location pairings, which could be learned most simply as individual associations. Alternatively, infants could use the faces or colorful backgrounds as a higher-order context to organize the inputs into simpler color-location or face-location rules, respectively. Infants were then given a generalization test designed to probe how they learned the initial pairings. The results indicated that infants appeared to use the faces as a higher-order context to organize simpler color-location rules, which then supported generalization of learning to new face contexts. These findings provide new evidence that infants are biased to organize reinforcement learning around social stimuli.
先前的研究表明，8个月大的婴儿就能利用环境的某些特征，比如视觉刺激的形状或颜色，作为线索将简单输入组织成层次规则结构，这是一种强大的强化学习形式，支持将先前学到的知识推广到新情境中。然而，尤其是在杂乱的自然环境中，有大量潜在线索可用于将学习构建成层次规则结构。目前尚不清楚婴儿如何确定哪些特征构成了用于将输入组织成层次规则结构的高阶情境。在此，我们研究9个月大的婴儿是否更倾向于将社会刺激而非非社会刺激用作高阶情境，来将简单视觉空间输入的学习组织成层次规则集。向婴儿展示了四组面部/颜色 - 目标位置配对，这些配对最简单的学习方式是作为个体关联。或者，婴儿可以将面部或彩色背景用作高阶情境，分别将输入组织成更简单的颜色 - 位置或面部 - 位置规则。然后对婴儿进行了一项泛化测试，以探究他们如何学习最初的配对。结果表明，婴儿似乎将面部用作高阶情境来组织更简单的颜色 - 位置规则，进而支持将学习推广到新的面部情境中。这些发现提供了新的证据，表明婴儿倾向于围绕社会刺激来组织强化学习。
