What is the optimal penalty for errors in infant skill learning? Behavioral analyses indicate that errors are frequent but trivial as infants acquire foundational skills. In learning to walk, for example, falling is commonplace but appears to incur o...
What drives children to explore and learn when external rewards are uncertain or absent? Across three studies, we tested whether information gain itself acts as an internal reward and suffices to motivate children's actions. We measured 24-56-month-o...
What is the role of errors in infants' acquisition of basic skills such as walking, skills that require immense amounts of practice to become flexible and generative? Do infants change their behaviors based on negative feedback from errors, as sugges...
Both humans and non-human animals exhibit sensitivity to the approximate number of items in a visual array, as indexed by their performance in numerosity discrimination tasks, and even neonates can detect changes in numerosity. These findings are oft...
We used two simple unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify differential trajectories of change in children who undergo intensive working memory (WM) training. We used self-organizing maps (SOMs)-a type of simple artificial neural network...
There is considerable evidence that labeling supports infants' object categorization. Yet in daily life, most of the category exemplars that infants encounter will remain unlabeled. Inspired by recent evidence from machine learning, we propose that i...
Tourette syndrome (TS) is a developmental neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics. Individuals with TS would benefit greatly from advances in prediction of symptom timecourse and treatment effectiveness. As a first step, we ap...
Looking at caregivers' faces is important for early social development, and there is a concomitant increase in neural correlates of attention to familiar versus novel faces in the first 6 months. However, by 12 months of age brain responses may not d...