ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2023
Eight-Month-Old Infants Meta-Learn by Downweighting Irrelevant Evidence.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Individual Differences in Infants' Curiosity Are Linked to Cognitive Capacity in Early Childhood.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Active control over exploration improves memory in toddlers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Toddlers strategically adapt their information search.Nature communications · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Infants learn to navigate the complexity of the physical and social world at an outstanding pace, but how they accomplish this learning is still largely unknown. Recent advances in human and artificial intelligence research propose that a key feature to achieving quick and efficient learning is meta-learning, the ability to make use of prior experiences to learn how to learn better in the future. Here we show that 8-month-old infants successfully engage in meta-learning within very short timespans after being exposed to a new learning environment. We developed a Bayesian model that captures how infants attribute informativity to incoming events, and how this process is optimized by the meta-parameters of their hierarchical models over the task structure. We fitted the model with infants' gaze behavior during a learning task. Our results reveal how infants actively use past experiences to generate new inductive biases that allow future learning to proceed faster.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.