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A study opens the window on the process of reasoning in infants

A study carried out by members of the Reasoning and Infant Cognition (RICO) research group, pertaining to the Center for Brain and Cognition, with participation of the Cognitive Development Center of Budapest (Hungary) and the Nencki Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland). The study will be published on 16 March in the journal Science.

16.03.2018

 

 

Previous studies have shown that during the first two years of the life of a human being sophisticated cognitive skills are already possessed. For example, babies have the ability to pose and confirm hypotheses, an essential strategy to understand and predict the phenomena that surround us.

Scientists have explained this ability alluding to models that describe the success in reasoning in contexts of uncertainty by adjusting the probability of our hypotheses being right as sufficient evidence accumulates. However, the way in which these hypotheses are formulated and validated has so far been little explored.

This was the starting point of research published on 16 March in Science, which explores human reasoning skills at an early age and was carried out through international collaboration between members of the Reasoning and Infant Cognition (RICO) research group at Pompeu Fabra University and ICREA, along with members of the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary) and the Nencki Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland). All authors are or have been members of the RICO research group of the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), UPF.

The research involved the participation of babies aged 12 to 19 months, along with adults. In the study, to test reasoning skills, the researchers designed experiments which consisted of presenting animated scenes that showed a pair of objects in front of which the participants, through very simple rules of logic, had to deduce which of the two objects was concealed inside a container. Thus, the participants’ task was to observe the scenes while the way they visually explored their content was recorded. This ocular inspection was recorded using an EyeTracker that measured the position of the eyes every 16 milliseconds.

Very similar strategies for reasoning  between infants and adults

With this methodology, the researchers studied the logical inference that the participant performed faced with certain situations. For example, in one experiment in half of the cases the object was hidden from the participant’s sight, and no reasoning was required for its identification, as it was not displayed. In the other half, the object was shown, allowing concluding that it was the other object that was hidden. The tests were designed so that any difference in the participants’ reactions was due to thought processes and not to physical variations in the content of the scenes.

It is known that the pupil is an indicator of cognitive effort, being larger when tasks are more difficult. Through the experiments described above it was observed that at the time when there is evidence available to make a logical inference, infants show greater pupil dilation. What is more, this response by the pupils to the scenes that require applying logical rules is surprisingly stable, it does not only happen in babies of 12 months but also in those of 19 months and in adults, which would suggest that “participants of such dissimilar ages would be using common strategies to reason about these same contents”, affirm Ana Martín and Nicoló Cesana, principal investigators of the study and members of RICO. In the same way, the study has confirmed that the strategy of exploration is qualitatively and quantitatively different depending on whether or not the scenes invite making a logical deduction.

The authors consider these results as “proof that the strategies that allow human beings to combine information to reason about the things that surround us are already present at an early age”. Therefore, these results contribute to clarifying a widely debated hot potato in the last thirty years about the existence of early logical reasoning abilities in humans, suggesting that some mental processes of infants, even before they start speaking, are already similar to those of adults, and more complex than had been thought until now.

Reference work:

Nicoló Cesana-Arlotti, Ana Martín, Ernö Teglas, Liza Vorobyova, Ryszard Cetnarski, Luca Bonatti (2018), “Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants”, Science, 16 March.

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