A Rational Information Gathering Account of Infant Habituation

Abstract

Gaze is one of the primary experimental measures for studying cognitive development, especially in preverbal infants. However, the field is only beginning to develop a principled explanatory framework for making sense of the various factors affecting gaze. We approach this issue by addressing infant gaze from first principles, using rational information gathering. In particular, we revisit the influential descriptive account of Hunter and Ames (1988) (H&A), which posits a set of regularities argued to govern how gaze preference for a stimulus changes with experience and other factors. When H&A’s model is reconsidered from the perspective of rational information gathering (as recently also proposed by other authors), one feature of the model emerges as surprising: that preference for a stimulus is not monotonic with exposure. This claim, which has at least some empirical support, is in contrast to most statistical measures of informativeness, which strictly decline with experience. We present a normative, computational theory of visual exploration that rationalizes this and other features of the classic account. Our account suggests that H&A’s signature nonmonotonic pattern is a direct manifestation of a ubiquitous principle of the value of information in sequential tasks, other consequences of which have recently been observed in a range of settings including deliberation, exploration, curiosity, and boredom. This is that the value of information gathering, putatively driving gaze, depends on the interplay of a stimulus’ informativeness (called Gain, the focus of other rationally motivated accounts) with a second factor (called Need) reflecting the estimated chance that information will be used in the future. This computational decomposition draws new connections between infant gaze and other cases of exploration, and offers novel, quantitative interpretations and predictions about the factors that may impact infant exploratory attention.