
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16gopnik.html
======
anatoly
What a disappointing article. Maybe there's more meat to the studies cited in
it, but the way they're presented here makes them seem borderline trivial, and
certainly much less interesting than claimed.

1\. A baby sees a box with a lot of white balls with a few reds; then the baby
is more surprised to see 4 reds with 1 white drawn out of the box than vice
versa. Why does it "prove that babies could understand probabilities"? Why not
suppose that the reds are more interesting to look at because they were more
rare in the original set? Show a baby four identical bears and a giraffe;
which toy will she later prefer to play with?

2\. "In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T.
demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and
effect."

In other related and equally exciting news, MIT researchers discovered that
water appears to be wet. Come on! What parent of a young child _hasn't_
noticed that they're exploring cause and effect, every single day, all the
time, _at least_ since they learn to manipulate small objects? And the study
itself - gosh, couldn't it be simpler for a child to press one lever than two
levers simultaneously, and therefore the group that didn't know what happens
in that simple scenario spent more time with the toy?

3\. "These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put
the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine."

But if the children learned the effect of each block from the first time they
observed it in action, completely ignoring subsequent times and therefore
unable to use any probabilistic reasoning, you would still expect the same
effect to happen on average in a group of children. In other words, this setup
doesn't even prove that the children can distinguish a mostly working block
from a mostly non-working one (doesn't sound as exciting as "high-
probability", does it?).

Given the way all these experiments are described, it also seems doubtful that
the sample sizes were adequate, that there was a control group, that they were
double-blind.

Basically all this seems like a bunch of wishful thinking, and a set of sloppy
experiments drawn up to reach a foregone conclusion.

~~~
robg
These seem like all good questions, but an op-ed in the NY Times isn't the
place to address them. There just isn't room to specify all of the tested
variables and their controls and how the results support the conclusions. Of
course the NY Times should be linking to the original research reports.

Still, I don't know how this op-ed could lead someone to think the research
was sloppy. For me to say that I'd have to, after I read the original reports,
present alternative designs that eliminated confounding variables but that
didn't introduce additional ones.

Here are the papers:

1\. <http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~fei/XuGarcia-PNAS.pdf>

2\.
[http://web.mit.edu/eccl/papers/bonawitzandschulzseriousfun.p...](http://web.mit.edu/eccl/papers/bonawitzandschulzseriousfun.pdf)

3\. <http://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers/Kushnir%20DevPsych.pdf>

I'm sure the researchers would be pleased to answer any questions.

~~~
anatoly
Thank you for tracking down the papers.

------
JabavuAdams
Not a great title, but a good article, nonetheless. If you're interested in
machine intelligence, you need to spend some time with infants.

I have a nine month old, and it's been really interesting to watch her
develop.

You can see where people get these ideas of multiple agents interacting. For a
while, anytime her hand was within a certain distance from her face, it would
"snap" to her mouth. She'd clearly be trying to do something else, but then
the hand would get close to the mouth, and OMNOMNOM.

Pattern matching and mimicry. Most things we do, we do because that's what
we've always done. /hand-waving

~~~
jerf
Yeah, I've noticed that with my kid, too. When he learned to sit up and crawl,
he would be nearly asleep, presumably in that part of sleep where your brain
is wandering but you're not quite asleep yet, then suddenly, _bam_ , flip over
and get on all fours to crawl, then start standing up on the bed. Once when I
let him finish the task, he even visibly woke up, looked at me with some
surprise, and then started crying again because he was tired, wanted to sleep,
and clearly did not want to be standing up. Probably blamed me for it, too. No
intentionality, it's just the "standing program" fired at an inopportune time.

Another funny one (from an AI perspective) dates from when he was about 4
months old; we were sticking our tongues out at him and he was starting to try
to copy us, and I swear, you could see his leg jerk, then his left arm, then
his neck, until finally he got his tongue out, just like there was a little
man in his head pushing buttons until he found the right one.

On the parent's side: We have a dog and two cats, and our child just passed a
year old. My wife was just telling me that she's caught herself being
surprised a few times over the past few days, as my son does things like "puts
the lid back on the container". She said she realized that up to this point
she'd been subconsciously applying the "pet" template to our son, since that
roughly matched his capabilities for the past few months (non-word
vocalizations for needs, limited manipulation skills, understands only a few
words, etc.), which she didn't even realize until suddenly he started to do a
few things that didn't fit the template, like put a lid back on a container,
or spontaneously use a keyring to mime locking the door (to the best of his
ability). Kind of an interesting conceptual problem on the adult side.

~~~
andreyf
_She said she realized that up to this point she'd been subconsciously
applying the "pet" template to our son, since that roughly matched his
capabilities for the past few months_

This really surprised me, also. Especially so, because first "human" things my
daughter did was to start offering to feed us when we fed her (~7 months). It
would seem social reciprocation was her first social instinct - long before
speech, feeling of ownership, etc.

~~~
jerf
My child is a boy. I already had little sympathy for the idea that we're born
a blank slate and that society imposes gender templates, but what little
sympathy I had for the idea is now gone.

He's not hostile or asocial or anything, but he'd much rather hit his head on
something, cry, and crawl right back over to try again in 5 minutes. Note that
we _know_ it's not a matter of being dumb, because there are other things like
that he learns from. He's just... a boy. I think perhaps boys could fit into
the "pet" template a bit longer, since girls are more humanly social, earlier,
on average. (He's perfectly within normal parameters for his age and gender;
he loves people, plenty of eye contact, etc., but girls are definitely
different on average.)

~~~
JabavuAdams
Actually, I think your observations show the opposite: i.e. the strength of
socialization.

Suppose I didn't know your child's gender. The behaviour you described would
not sound particularly male or female to me, given my biases. On the other
hand, I infer that for you this appears to be typically "boyish" behaviour,
and you use this as evidence of strong in-born gender traits. I.e. my daughter
does exactly the same thing, but I didn't consider it "girlish". More "babies
are duuuumb."

One interesting thing about raising an infant is that everyone seems to
project different things on to the child, and to have different
interpretations of the same events. For instance, my wife and I focus on the
fact that our daughter seems strong and smart. Others keep telling us how
pretty she is.

If she makes certain facial expressions, friends tell us it means one thing,
while various relatives all have their own interpretations, that differ from
our own interpretation.

I don't think your observations confirm anything except your own biases. In
case that sounds harsh, I think this is true of all of us.

Note that I'm not making the strong claim that there are _no_ gender
differences. I just observe that there's much larger variation between
individuals than between genders. Finally, I observe that parents treat girls
and boys subtly differently even from before birth, and that this can't help
but have an effect on their development.

~~~
greendestiny
You definitely can't separate out your own biases easily, but that's not to
say there are no sex differences. Here's an interesting article on the gender
toy preferences of monkeys:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196183/Why-boys-
pic...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196183/Why-boys-pick-Bob-
Barbie--children-genetically-programmed-say-scientists.html)

I try to accept these differences and go with them as a parent, not ignore
them or spend my time blaming society. I don't think they are incompatible
with the hopes and dreams I have for my daughter. I don't think a preference
for dolls means my daughter has to be a waitress instead of an engineer.

------
wglb
Good, but old news.

This is a useful educational article, but I had a pediatrician in 1981 explain
much the same facts to us about our just-born daughter.

The lesson is not to go off and overstimulate the child, but 1) observe
closely what the child is paying attention to and 2) don't presume that the
kid doesn't know significantly more about what is going on that you might
think and 3) don't talk baby talk to the kid. Emulate as closely as you can
what they say. This will give very positive feedback of the right kind.

i did an experiment with a friends just-born baby. I would get the kid's
attention, then stick my tongue out. After a couple of repeats of this, the
kid responded by sticking her tongue out, much to the astonishment of her
mother. "There is a person in there".

So if we can follow this line of reasoning about adults, at least in some
cultures, being off in understanding what kids understand just after birth,
how far off has that perception slipped by the time they are six? teenagers?

