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A kid's emotions are actually tightly linked to cost (or rather: fitness) functions: it gets fascinated by things it just barely cannot do. Somehow it "knows" t

A kid's emotions are actually tightly linked to cost (or rather: fitness) functions: it gets fascinated by things it just barely cannot do. Somehow it "knows" that it could learn it and gets drawn to it. It gets bored by things it can do already, and frustrated by matters that are too hard. I think there's a pattern - emotions are a device for steering the system as a whole in a certain direction that increases its (or rather: its genes') chance of survival - finding a mate, finding food, adapting to the environment. They are one of the devices used for increasing our chance to create offspring, even in places where we don't expect them. For example there is this study where people around the world were asked in detail what kind of art they would find most beautiful (there's a TED talk about it): basically, across the globe, from Greenland to Sahara, it was a landscape with lush greens and a waterhole: a place where food would ve abundant. This system is highly adaptive - e.g. if you look at how beauty ideals have changed over the centuries: the 16th century "Rubens type" signalled fitness in a way that we would call "overweight" today. A skinny model from today wouldn't have drawn the attention of Rubens' contemporaries. So perhaps we have an innate mechanism to recognize fitness within the local context, and we are drawn to it. I think one problem of computer scientists working on the problem might be that they are often not self aware about their own emotions. Perhaps we should have more painters and fashion designers amongst us to understand the topic.

m_mueller 11y ago
To me this model feels a bit too simplistic. If you only look at how children learn their abilities, then yes, absolutely. Where it breaks down for me is in the interaction with play partners. The joy he seems to get for playing together doesn't seem to be fully explainable through pure evolutionary steering / fitness functions, but it's hard to put my finger on what's missing in the picture. An example is his joyful giggling when I'm doing something unexpected. You can see the tug of war between fearfulness and joyfulness - at the beginning when they become sensitive to playful behavior it makes them afraid, but more and more this is replaced with pure joy, also showing a trust relationship. So to me it seems the curiosity goes beyond just what the child can achieve him/herself in the near future, it's also a curiosity and joy of observing the world, and more importantly, what the caregivers are doing. Everything new is exciting, and much of it doesn't seem to be something that could have been selected for directly. So there seems to be some emergent behavior that comes from the interaction of evolved chemistry/signaling, and the actual cognitive functions.
- qbrass 11y ago
  Unknown things are to be avoided, until feedback shows that there's no threat, which makes aversion costly. Then simple observing is the lowest cost option until there's fewer novelties. The extra energy expended from interaction is then offset by the gains in feedback. Eventually even that peters out and finding something else to do makes more sense.

m_mueller 11y ago

To me this model feels a bit too simplistic. If you only look at how children learn their abilities, then yes, absolutely. Where it breaks down for me is in the interaction with play partners. The joy he seems to get for playing together doesn't seem to be fully explainable through pure evolutionary steering / fitness functions, but it's hard to put my finger on what's missing in the picture. An example is his joyful giggling when I'm doing something unexpected. You can see the tug of war between fearfulness and joyfulness - at the beginning when they become sensitive to playful behavior it makes them afraid, but more and more this is replaced with pure joy, also showing a trust relationship. So to me it seems the curiosity goes beyond just what the child can achieve him/herself in the near future, it's also a curiosity and joy of observing the world, and more importantly, what the caregivers are doing. Everything new is exciting, and much of it doesn't seem to be something that could have been selected for directly. So there seems to be some emergent behavior that comes from the interaction of evolved chemistry/signaling, and the actual cognitive functions.

qbrass 11y ago
Unknown things are to be avoided, until feedback shows that there's no threat, which makes aversion costly. Then simple observing is the lowest cost option until there's fewer novelties. The extra energy expended from interaction is then offset by the gains in feedback. Eventually even that peters out and finding something else to do makes more sense.