9 ms·

What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages

96 points by ontouchstart 10y ago

thesumofall 10y ago
The title is a bit misleading - it's basically about how babies/kids learn by observation and that we should give them more opportunity to observe/experiment rather than tell them how the world works
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  > The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them. This is the "physics part" of thr story. It is beyond simple imitation or following instructions.
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  This is the "foreign language" part of the story. > In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands. > In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands. > In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    might also be that a new language takes too much attention to focus on the visual. Even, lip-reading would take the visual focus.
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened. For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-( So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode. BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class. And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.
themartorana 10y ago
I don't mean to be flip, but this is obvious to anyone that has kid(s). Watching them observe and test and learn (and giving them the space to do so) is one of the great joys of my life. That said, I also see how once children reach a certain age, some parents to become obsessed with the speed of learning, and try to introduce instructed learning with the hope it will work faster, better, and teach them to read faster, etc. This is a good article that gently encourages allowing children continued space to learn through observation and experimentation with their environment and surroundings. There is a place for instructed learning, but it is not the only way of learning, and for younger children at least, definitely not the most important.
dschiptsov 10y ago
Literally absolutely nothing. Human (and any other) brain has been shaped by evolutionary forces according to constrains and features of the shared environment (gravitation, light, sound, day/night changes, climate, etc) and has evolved machinery to pick up any language from the shared social environment. So-called hard-wired "knowledge" is just a structure of neurons in specialized areas of the brain, shaped by evolution (selection on random mutations) which reflects the environment.
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Ther time scale of evlolution is a few orders of magnitude longer than learning process. So perhaps we are not talking about "hard-wired knowldedge but "physics intuition" in the context of how babies response to those "artificial" magic tricks. > In one recent experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  > Literally absolutely nothing. That position is known as the blank slate and is no longer taken seriously among scientists. Language is an instinct that springs forth even when there is no language to pick up from the environment. What you think you know is incorrect.
  - dschiptsov 10y ago
    I said in the comment above that "knowledge" is represented as a structure of specialized areas of the brain - stored procedures, if you wish, but the system needs to be "trained" by the spoken (or signed) language from the shared environment. The "machinery" probably has notions of a thing, a process, and an attribute, because it reflects characteristics of shared physical environment and every human language has nouns, verbs and adjectives. There are also notions of time and space, due to serialized input of sense organs and self-centered nature of our perception. Evolved, highly-specialized machinery of the brain's specialized areas reflects major characteristics of the shared environment available to it through the sense organs. There is nothing more than that. No other "knowledge".
ontouchstart 10y ago
Regarding physics intuition, it reminds me this short video clip by Richard Feynman on how his father "taught" him that deeper observation reveals Physics intuition of a more basic concept of "inertia". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjm8JeDKvdc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjm8JeDKvdc
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands. Or maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn't even "tap" the box but more like "bumped into" it hands-first. The difference between a "tap with intent" and a "bump without intent" or even a "tap without specific intent other than basic curiosity" is probably not even possible to measure. That's why I find it very hard to trust experiments like this: they're supposed to tell us something about the way babies think but we can't actually check we got the right end of the stick. They're babies, so we can't just ask them. If we asked adults to do the same thing we wouldn't learn anything new either. So what's the point? The result is that researchers get into this elaborate dance with their subjects trying to set things up so there's no plausible alternative explanation than what the research is trying to show- but a) there always is and b) it's pretty damn annoying to what lengths the research goes to avoid admitting (a). Also, once I find one such transgression in an article I then find it very hard to read through with any shred of trust to the writer.
- jacinda 10y ago
  Actually, they have a control in place in the study itself and they could additionally have compared against the results from the 1988 study where all the experimenters hands were free. Sometimes the experimenter had their hands free and other times they did not. When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time. When the experimenter had their hands bound, the babies imitated the head action only 20% of the time. To me that's a big enough difference that the babies didn't just accidentally tap without specific intent. Actual write-up in Nature (which was linked to in the article): http://www.nature.com/articles/415755a.epdf http://www.nature.com/articles/415755a.epdf
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    >> When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time. There's an episode in Friends where Phoebe discovers she can change channels on the TV by blinking (if I recall correctly). Every time she blinks, the TV switches channel. Joey is there and he confirms it: whenever Phoebe blinks the TV changes channel. Every single time. Amazing. Then she loses it. So, I'm not saying you have to be Phoebe to get in that situation, in fact you certainly don't. It's very hard to untangle the mess of causality when you're experimenting, especially if we're talking humans, even infants, who are incredibly, impossibly complex. In any case all this is completely besides the point: it's impossible to know another person's mind state with accuracy unless you ask them and even then it's really hard to know for sure. So any experiment that purports to prove something about a person's mind state is most probably making a mistake, somewhere- same as papers purporting to show energy from the void and so on.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Great article. The author, Alison Gopnik, also has two very interesting books, The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosopher in the Crib. She's right about our education system. As John Taylor Gotti explains, it was designed in the nineteenth century to produce factory workers who would not think for themselves, but just take orders. But what we need today and tomorrow is people who will learn on their own initiative and figure out intelligent solutions (like open source software developers), and so we need an educational system that will encourage that sort of behavior. What Gopnik is saying that this is something natural for children, if we put them in the right circumstances.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  She's also Alan Gopnik's sister, there another few intellectual sibs, all sharing mother Myrna Gopnik, emerita linguistics prof at McGill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrna_Gopnik https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrna_Gopnik

96 points by ontouchstart 10y ago

The title is a bit misleading - it's basically about how babies/kids learn by observation and that we should give them more opportunity to observe/experiment rather than tell them how the world works

ontouchstart 10y ago
> The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them. This is the "physics part" of thr story. It is beyond simple imitation or following instructions.
ontouchstart 10y ago
This is the "foreign language" part of the story. > In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands. > In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands. > In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.
- posterboy 10y ago
  might also be that a new language takes too much attention to focus on the visual. Even, lip-reading would take the visual focus.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened. For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-( So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode. BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class. And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.

themartorana 10y ago

I don't mean to be flip, but this is obvious to anyone that has kid(s). Watching them observe and test and learn (and giving them the space to do so) is one of the great joys of my life. That said, I also see how once children reach a certain age, some parents to become obsessed with the speed of learning, and try to introduce instructed learning with the hope it will work faster, better, and teach them to read faster, etc. This is a good article that gently encourages allowing children continued space to learn through observation and experimentation with their environment and surroundings. There is a place for instructed learning, but it is not the only way of learning, and for younger children at least, definitely not the most important.

dschiptsov 10y ago

Literally absolutely nothing. Human (and any other) brain has been shaped by evolutionary forces according to constrains and features of the shared environment (gravitation, light, sound, day/night changes, climate, etc) and has evolved machinery to pick up any language from the shared social environment. So-called hard-wired "knowledge" is just a structure of neurons in specialized areas of the brain, shaped by evolution (selection on random mutations) which reflects the environment.

ontouchstart 10y ago
Ther time scale of evlolution is a few orders of magnitude longer than learning process. So perhaps we are not talking about "hard-wired knowldedge but "physics intuition" in the context of how babies response to those "artificial" magic tricks. > In one recent experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them.
gnaritas 10y ago
> Literally absolutely nothing. That position is known as the blank slate and is no longer taken seriously among scientists. Language is an instinct that springs forth even when there is no language to pick up from the environment. What you think you know is incorrect.
- dschiptsov 10y ago
  I said in the comment above that "knowledge" is represented as a structure of specialized areas of the brain - stored procedures, if you wish, but the system needs to be "trained" by the spoken (or signed) language from the shared environment. The "machinery" probably has notions of a thing, a process, and an attribute, because it reflects characteristics of shared physical environment and every human language has nouns, verbs and adjectives. There are also notions of time and space, due to serialized input of sense organs and self-centered nature of our perception. Evolved, highly-specialized machinery of the brain's specialized areas reflects major characteristics of the shared environment available to it through the sense organs. There is nothing more than that. No other "knowledge".

ontouchstart 10y ago

Regarding physics intuition, it reminds me this short video clip by Richard Feynman on how his father "taught" him that deeper observation reveals Physics intuition of a more basic concept of "inertia". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjm8JeDKvdc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjm8JeDKvdc

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands. Or maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn't even "tap" the box but more like "bumped into" it hands-first. The difference between a "tap with intent" and a "bump without intent" or even a "tap without specific intent other than basic curiosity" is probably not even possible to measure. That's why I find it very hard to trust experiments like this: they're supposed to tell us something about the way babies think but we can't actually check we got the right end of the stick. They're babies, so we can't just ask them. If we asked adults to do the same thing we wouldn't learn anything new either. So what's the point? The result is that researchers get into this elaborate dance with their subjects trying to set things up so there's no plausible alternative explanation than what the research is trying to show- but a) there always is and b) it's pretty damn annoying to what lengths the research goes to avoid admitting (a). Also, once I find one such transgression in an article I then find it very hard to read through with any shred of trust to the writer.

jacinda 10y ago
Actually, they have a control in place in the study itself and they could additionally have compared against the results from the 1988 study where all the experimenters hands were free. Sometimes the experimenter had their hands free and other times they did not. When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time. When the experimenter had their hands bound, the babies imitated the head action only 20% of the time. To me that's a big enough difference that the babies didn't just accidentally tap without specific intent. Actual write-up in Nature (which was linked to in the article): http://www.nature.com/articles/415755a.epdf http://www.nature.com/articles/415755a.epdf
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time. There's an episode in Friends where Phoebe discovers she can change channels on the TV by blinking (if I recall correctly). Every time she blinks, the TV switches channel. Joey is there and he confirms it: whenever Phoebe blinks the TV changes channel. Every single time. Amazing. Then she loses it. So, I'm not saying you have to be Phoebe to get in that situation, in fact you certainly don't. It's very hard to untangle the mess of causality when you're experimenting, especially if we're talking humans, even infants, who are incredibly, impossibly complex. In any case all this is completely besides the point: it's impossible to know another person's mind state with accuracy unless you ask them and even then it's really hard to know for sure. So any experiment that purports to prove something about a person's mind state is most probably making a mistake, somewhere- same as papers purporting to show energy from the void and so on.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Great article. The author, Alison Gopnik, also has two very interesting books, The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosopher in the Crib. She's right about our education system. As John Taylor Gotti explains, it was designed in the nineteenth century to produce factory workers who would not think for themselves, but just take orders. But what we need today and tomorrow is people who will learn on their own initiative and figure out intelligent solutions (like open source software developers), and so we need an educational system that will encourage that sort of behavior. What Gopnik is saying that this is something natural for children, if we put them in the right circumstances.

dredmorbius 10y ago
She's also Alan Gopnik's sister, there another few intellectual sibs, all sharing mother Myrna Gopnik, emerita linguistics prof at McGill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrna_Gopnik https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrna_Gopnik