PSY 457LEC Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Environmental Noise, Puzzle Video Game, Habituation
Document Summary
Researchers have started to uncover a set of powerful statistical & inductive learning mechanisms in infants & children. Strong support for the emerging view that young humans are rational, constructivist learners. The specific mechanisms identified in all of these studies appear to be domain general, applying to language learning, physical reasoning, psychological reasoning, property induction, & causal learning. The blooming buzzing confusion of early childhood potentially provides a substantial challenge to young learners. To start learning the structure & properties of the world, infants must 1st discover which info sources are useful. In particular, children must ignore both environmental noise, & stimuli from which they have nothing more to learn. Attention: ability to select part of the sensory input & disregard the rest. Both goal-directed selection & stimulus-driven capture: we can consciously guide our attention, but some info grabs our attention. Focused attention: sustaining one"s focus on a particular task that is, to sustain, / pay, attention.
