Humans make predictions about the future by compiling various sources of information guided by abstract knowledge, and creating possible expectations about the new situations that we face. In other words, when faced with a new situation, rational predictions are paramount among humans, rather than predictions based on experience alone.

We now know that the human capacity for reasoning is extremely rich, powerful and coherent, and starts in childhood, according to the findings of a study coordinated by Luca Bonatti, the ICREA researcher in the RICO(Reasoning and Infant Cognition) Research Group of the Cognition and Brain Unitof the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, which is published on May 27 and is featured on the cover of Science.

Luca Bonatti  coordinated an international team consisting of researchers from the Center for Cognitive Development and the Academy of Sciences, Budapest (Hungary), the MIT and the University of California (USA), the University of Venice (Italy) and the CNRS of the University of Aix-Marseille (France).

Infants engage in rational behaviour

In their paper, the authors show that when faced with a variety of complex stimuli, infants engage in precise and rational behaviour - an ability that they call "pure reasoning".

The aim of this study was to show the foundations of the " pure reasoning" identified in infants. The rational capacity of infants is generally assessed by measuring the time taken to respond to a given visual stimulus that acts as an indicator of surprise and newness.

The attention paid by infantsto a visual stimulus increases as it differs from their expectations based on their prior experience, or as the specific stimulus is more surprising to them. This response to stimulus was analysed in a series of experiments designed to that end. The data obtained formed the analytical basis for the results of this important study.

The study was carried out on infants aged twelve months age who had not yet developed the ability to speak, and as such were preverbal, and found that when infants are shown different complex objects in motion, they produce accurate predictions about the behaviour of these objects in the immediate future.

In the experiment, the infants were shown scenes like a lottery drum with various objects moving around inside and one of them coming out after variable occlusion periods. The scenes contain both probabilistic information about which object is likely to come out, and dynamic information about the movement of the objects.

The infants do this without having had any similar experience in the past, integrating various sources of information in an optimum manner and applying it in the right place. The rational behaviour that they engage in when faced with multiple and variable stimuli can be specified and has been confirmed to be consistent with a Bayesian stochastic function.

For further reference, see:

Ernö Téglás, Edward Vul, Vittorio Girotto, Michel Gonzalez, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Luca L. Bonatti, (2011), " Pure reasoning in 12-month-olds as probabilistic inference ", Science, 27 May, vol. 332, 6033, pp. 1054-1059, doi: 10.1126/science.1196404