Karni Gili, Emberson Lauren, Mattar Marcelo G, Daw Nathaniel D
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.
bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 18:2025.01.09.629775. doi: 10.1101/2025.01.09.629775.
Gaze is one of the primary experimental measures for studying cognitive development, especially in preverbal infants. However, the field is only beginning to develop a principled explanatory framework for making sense of the various factors affecting gaze. We approach this issue by addressing infant gaze from first principles, using rational information gathering. In particular, we revisit the influential descriptive account of Hunter and Ames (1988) (H&A), which posits a set of regularities argued to govern how gaze preference for a stimulus changes with experience and other factors. When the H&A's model is reconsidered from the perspective of rational information gathering (as recently also proposed by other authors), one feature of the model emerges as surprising: that preference for a stimulus is not monotonic with exposure. This claim, which has at least some empirical support, is in contrast to most statistical measures of informativeness, which strictly decline with experience. We present a normative, computational theory of visual exploration that rationalizes this and other features of the classic account. Our account suggests that H&A's signature nonmonotonic pattern is a direct manifestation of a ubiquitous principle of the value of information in sequential tasks, other consequences of which have recently been observed in a range of settings including deliberation, exploration, curiosity, and boredom. This is that the value of information gathering, putatively driving gaze, depends on the interplay of a stimulus' informativeness (called , the focus of other rationally motivated accounts) with a second factor (called ) reflecting the estimated chance that information will be used in the future. This computational decomposition draws new connections between infant gaze and other cases of exploration, and offers novel, quantitative interpretations and predictions about the factors that may impact infant exploratory attention.
注视是研究认知发展，尤其是学语前婴儿认知发展的主要实验手段之一。然而，该领域才刚刚开始构建一个有原则的解释框架，以理解影响注视的各种因素。我们从第一原理出发，运用理性信息收集来探讨婴儿注视这一问题。具体而言，我们重新审视了亨特和艾姆斯（1988）（H&A）颇具影响力的描述性理论，该理论提出了一组规律，认为这些规律支配着对刺激的注视偏好如何随经验和其他因素而变化。当从理性信息收集的角度重新审视H&A模型时（最近其他作者也提出了类似观点），该模型的一个特征显得令人惊讶：对刺激的偏好并非随着接触而单调变化。这一观点至少得到了一些实证支持，与大多数信息性的统计度量不同，后者会随着经验严格下降。我们提出了一种视觉探索的规范性计算理论，该理论使经典理论的这一特征及其他特征合理化。我们的理论表明，H&A标志性的非单调模式是序列任务中信息价值这一普遍原则的直接体现，该原则的其他后果最近在包括审议、探索、好奇心和无聊等一系列情境中都有观察到。即信息收集的价值（被认为驱动着注视）取决于刺激的信息性（称为 ，这是其他理性驱动理论的核心关注点）与反映信息未来被使用的估计可能性的第二个因素（称为 ）之间的相互作用。这种计算分解在婴儿注视与其他探索案例之间建立了新的联系，并对可能影响婴儿探索性注意力的因素提供了新颖的定量解释和预测。
