Learning while developing: How infants acquire intelligent behavior

Overflow Room: 201 A/B - Behavior is everything we do. With age and experience, infant behavior becomes more flexible, adaptive, and functional. More intelligent. How do infants acquire intelligent behavior? Babies are learning while developing. Advances in motor skills expand infants’ interactions with the environment—the parts of the environment they “touch” with eyes, hands, and body. In the course of everyday activity, infants acquire immense amounts of time-distributed, variable, error-filled practice for every type of foundational behavior that researchers study. Practice is largely spontaneous, self-motivated, and frequently not goal directed. Formal robot models suggest that infants’ natural practice regimen—replete with variability and errors—is optimally suited for building an intelligent behavioral system that responds adaptively to the constraints and opportunities of continually changing bodies and skills in an ever-changing world. I propose that open video sharing will speed progress toward understanding behavior and its development.