Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

Abstract

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration—getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one’s own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants’ motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants’ basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants’ early learning processes in theory, research, and application.

The ontogeny of multisensory peripersonal space in human infancy: From visual-tactile links to conscious expectations

“…It appears that 6-month-old infants already show some neural signatures of crossmodal expectation-based feedback across cortical regions 27 and that 1-year-olds can learn associations between cross-modal events and form predictions and expectations that can influence their neural responses to unexpected or contradictory events 31 . These findings suggest that infants' early sensory processing could be modulated by top-down influences, supporting the hypothesis that infants can generate an internal model of the environment and form predictions about it 30,33 . According to this framework, the development of infants' understanding of the physical world could be conceived as the formation of predictive models about the relation between entities in the environment and the infants' own body and its actions 33 .…”

“…These findings suggest that infants' early sensory processing could be modulated by top-down influences, supporting the hypothesis that infants can generate an internal model of the environment and form predictions about it 30,33 . According to this framework, the development of infants' understanding of the physical world could be conceived as the formation of predictive models about the relation between entities in the environment and the infants' own body and its actions 33 . This may include also infants' developing ability to perceive, understand and eventually predict the continuity between visual stimuli moving in peripersonal space and tactile stimuli on the body.…”

A hierarchical model for interpersonal verbal communication

“…Here, we mainly focus on verbal communication, as it is the dominant and most commonly studied mode of language communication compared to non-verbal or sign language communication. The methodological aspects and the non-verbal components of social interaction are not discussed in detail here, as they have been well reviewed elsewhere (for reviews, see De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007 ; Hari and Kujala, 2009 ; Dumas et al , 2011 ; Hasson et al , 2012 ; Wheatley et al , 2012 ; Schilbach et al , 2013 ; Babiloni and Astolfi, 2014 ; Hari et al , 2015 ; Hasson and Frith, 2016 ; Gallotti et al , 2017 ; Bolis and Schilbach, 2018 ; Minagawa et al , 2018 ; Shamay-Tsoory et al , 2019 ; Czeszumski et al , 2020 ; Köster et al , 2020 ). However, non-verbal communication will be briefly mentioned when it is relevant.…”

Predictive processing and developmental language disorder

“…Error-based fine-tuning may not be a necessary precondition to the development of syntactic awareness, in the sense that without error-based fine-tuning syntactic awareness would not develop at all, but there is good evidence that it can facilitate its development (den Ouden et al, 2012;Huettig & Mani, 2016). Indeed, the notion that expectation violation can drive learning is central to many paradigms commonly used in infant and child development research, including those monitoring pupil dilation, sucking rates, gaze direction, and neurophysiological activity in response to surprising stimuli, such as objects that move in unexpected ways and unpredictable human actions (Köster, Kayhan, Langeloh, & Hoehl, 2020). Across paradigms, infants and children are more likely to attend to surprising stimuli than unsurprising stimuli, plausibly in an implicit attempt to incorporate unexpected behaviour into their mental models of the world.…”