Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants

Abstract

Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a potential deduction, infants' pupils dilated, and their eyes moved toward the ambiguous object when inferences could be computed, in contrast to transparent scenes not requiring inferences to identify the object. These oculomotor markers resembled those of adults inspecting similar scenes, suggesting that intuitive and stable logical structures involved in the interpretation of dynamic scenes may be part of the fabric of the human mind.

The role of developmental change and linguistic experience in the mutual exclusivity effect

“…Although this proposal was formulated on the basis of developmental data showing failures at 14 months (with an interesting pattern of alternative behavior), there is no account provided for what sorts of developmental changes or experiences lead to the emergence of disjunctive syllogism. Indeed, syllogistic reasoning of this sort is argued to be available even in younger children (Cesana-Arlotti et al, 2018;Halberda, 2018). If so, again, auxiliary theoretical assumptions are required to specify the specific maturational processes or developmental experiences that lead the inference to become available for older children.…”

How We Know What Not To Think

“…Our model is inspired by recent studies in diverse areas of cognitive science, and which all point to a remarkably consistent structure for default representations of possible actions: (i) judgments of possibility and spontaneous ideation, (ii) causal attribution, (iii) formal semantics and psycholinguistics, (iv) moral judgment and free will, and others. In each case, two factors have an influence on the default representations of possible actions: probability and value [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. This fingerprint of shared adaptive sampling allows us to track its promiscuous role in cognition, and provides vital clues about its ultimate function.…”

Cognitive basis for the development of aesthetic preference: Findings from symmetry preference

“…Our findings also provide new insight into understanding the relationship between the early emerging perceptual preference and the later developed subjective preference with value evaluation. The visual preferences that start as early as infancy have been used to infer the development of children's cognitive process or value evaluation, such as for moral judgement [54], social evaluation [55] or logical induction [56]. However, the early emerging preferences focused on by these previous studies were usually induced by a certain task linked with a specific domain.…”