Mar 30 2009
Infants Like to Watch, and Learn
Those human apes — they love to watch other apes. They? I mean we. And we learn by watching. From very early in life. In January of this year a study into the observational learning of infants made new ground –
University of Washington psychologists have learned that 10-month-old infants use their prior exposure and understanding of familiar actions by a person to unravel novel actions. However, this ability is limited by the location in which the new action is performed.
In particular, infants were able to learn the intent/desire of an adult, and when later, in the same room, use the learning to anticipate the adult’s next move, as measured by the visual attention of the child. But the tendency to make an inference of sorts was context-dependent: only in the same room did the infants seem to anticipate what would happen next.
Jessica Sommerville of the University of Washington says -
Our work suggests that children’s learning may benefit if they are provided with information about the desired end result of a game or activity before starting it.
And maybe keep in mind that learning can be context-dependent, or at least depend partly upon context clues.
