Not only does one have to represent the two mutually exclusive possibilities and negate one of them, but the outcome of the deductive operation has to be employed as an input for preference attribution. Something that is easy for an adult, may be challenging for an infant. tea or coffee, not tea, therefore she must prefer coffee). It is often the case that we witness situations in which the preference of a protagonist is unclear, as critical perceptual evidence is missing, but we can figure it out by thinking logically (e.g. In a series of studies performed at the Babylab of Central European University (CEU), Nicolo Cesana-Arlotti (Johns Hopkins University) together with Agnes Melinda Kovacs (CEU) and Erno Teglas (CEU) asked whether 14-month-old infants can use a preverbal form of logical reasoning (i.e., the process of elimination) to correctly infer the motivations driving other people’s actions. This reveals an essential logical route to knowledge acquisition that is available to infants very early on, before they can speak (“Infants recruit logic to learn about the social world”). Specifically, they are able to infer via elimination of alternatives what other people may prefer. Logic seems to provide a special toolbox that can enrich learning at the age where such support is much needed: in infancy.Ī new study published in Nature Communications on November 26, 2020, finds that babies as young at 14 months old can reason logically to learn about the social world even if perceptually available data are scant. They consider the relevant possibilities, eliminate those against which they collected negative evidence, and use the product of this reasoning for learning about the motivations underlying other people’s actions. disjunction, A or B, not A, therefore B) to aid knowledge acquisition in the social domain. Nicolo Cesana-Arlotti (Johns Hopkins University), Agnes Melinda Kovacs (CEU) and Erno Teglas (CEU) provide the first evidence that infants are not helpless in situations where directly observable information is scarce, and can flexibly use logical inferences (e.g. But can they also learn from the unobservable? Can young infants, just as adults, use logical inferences to learn not only about the psychical but also about the social world, and in particular about the internal states of other people? For instance, could an infant, in the absence of direct evidence use logic to infer the particular preference that may guide someone’s actions? Young infants can learn very well from observation. Their visual access may be blocked, some objects may be occluded by others, or they may just not pay enough attention to all details. Infants, like adults, do not always have access to all necessary information at a specific time. In contrast to the predominant view, suggesting that infants and young children cannot reason logically, a new study ( ) published in Nature Communications on November 26 show that infants already at 14 months rely on an essential form of logical inference, and more surprisingly, they can even integrate logical conclusions into new inferences that they make about the social world. efficient learning from statistical evidence, tracking numerical information, etc.), it is still a question whether pre-verbal infants are equipped with a logical apparatus that would help them go beyond the available perceptual evidence in the process of learning. When do children arrive to make logical inferences? Is there logic before language? While developmental findings from the last 30 years have changed our view of the young infant highlighting many amazing capacities (e.g. Since Piaget there is a long-lasting disagreement among psychologists about the availability of logical concepts at different stages of development.
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