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tuesday :: december 3, 2002
 
 
> a look, a fossilized leave and two cars
first look at the world
:: making sense of the unknown

Baby's first look at the world is likely a dizzying array of shapes and motion that are meaningless to a newborn, but researchers at the University of Rochester have now shown that babies use relationships between objects to build an understanding of the world. By noting how often objects appear together, infants can efficiently take in more knowledge than if they were to simply see the same shapes individually.

"It's long been assumed that we use relationships among parts of scenes to learn which parts form whole objects, but the idea has never been tested, nor was it clear how early this ability develops," says József Fiser, co- author with Richard N. Aslin of the research. "This research shows that building a concept of the world by recognizing relationships among shapes in images is possibly innate, and a very essential ability in babies."

"In order to make sense of the unknown you must be able to learn new things and represent them to yourself in an efficient way," says József Fiser, co- author with Richard N. Aslin of the research. "You don't want a mechanism that will tell you that leaves are always found on cars just because you happened to see a leaf on a car once. You want a mechanism that will tell you that cars can exist without leaves and vice versa, while at the same time telling you that cars always come with wheels, for instance." If a baby sees a leaf on a car, she would build a relationship between the two, perhaps calling the combination a "leafcar." But she might then see several cars without leaves on them and so the concept of leafcar is weakened as she unconsciously realizes that statistically, the concept of leafcar is more and more useless. Noting that every car she sees has wheels, however, becomes statistically more and more useful as it is reinforced with every new car she sees. This relationship-identification is important because the baby can build her knowledge base on it. When she sees a wheelbarrow, she'll unconsciously note that while all cars have wheels, not all wheels have cars, and a new concept of wheels will begin to emerge. In this way, the frequency of relationships, and the predictability between visual objects allows her to build knowledge on knowledge in a hierarchical manner. >from *Infants build knowledge of their visual world on statistics*, november 25, 2002.

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