Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Google DeepMind, London, UK.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2024 Aug;28(8):726-738. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.05.001. Epub 2024 Jun 4.
Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopmental events across species, however, it has been found that humans are not born with especially immature brains compared with animal species with a shorter helpless period. Consistent with this, the rapidly growing field of infant neuroimaging has found that brain connectivity and functional activation at birth share many similarities with the mature brain. Inspired by machine learning, where deep neural networks also benefit from a 'helpless period' of pre-training, we propose that human infants are learning a foundation model: a set of fundamental representations that underpin later cognition with high performance and rapid generalisation.
人类有一个漫长的产后无助期,通常归因于人类特有的母体限制,导致大脑高度不成熟时早产。然而,通过在物种间对齐神经发育事件,人们发现与无助期较短的动物物种相比,人类出生时的大脑并没有特别不成熟。与这一观点一致的是,快速发展的婴儿神经影像学领域发现,出生时的大脑连接和功能激活与成熟大脑有许多相似之处。受机器学习的启发,深度神经网络也受益于预训练的“无助期”,我们提出人类婴儿正在学习一种基础模型:一组基本表示,这些表示以高性能和快速泛化为基础,为以后的认知奠定基础。