Richard Aslin (University of Rochester, USA) is giving a Hebb Colloquium tomorrow.
Time: 3.30pm.
Location: Room S1/3 in the Stewart Psychology Building at McGill.
The Dynamics of Information Processing in Infants: Eye-tracking and Neuroimaging.
Abstract: Infants are capable of rapidly learning the distributional properties of information in a wide variety of domains. This mechanism of statistical learning will be discussed in both the auditory (language) and visual domains, paying particular attention to the types of constraints that enable such learning to be tractable and efficient. Recently, we have asked whether infants prefer to attend to (and presumably process) information that is neither too simple nor too complex. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we provide evidence in support of this bias, which we call the Goldilocks effect. We have also been developing a non-invasive optical imaging method to assess the neural correlates of learning. Preliminary results provide insights about the relative weights attached to visual and auditory information in infants’ attention and learning.