We ask a lot about ourselves as kids. Somehow, we must evolve from sensory blobs to flexible, rational, and thoughtful communicators in just a few years. Here you are, a child with no vocabulary, living in a room littered with toys and stuffed animals. You pick up a Lincoln log and your caretaker tells you, “This is a ‘log.’” Eventually, you understand that “log” does not strictly refer to the brown plastic cylinder. This genre often refers to brown plastic cylinders in general, but to brown plastic cylinders that represent the characteristics of felled, bare tree parts, which of course are also “logs of wood”. .
There has been much research and heated debate surrounding how infants do this. Some scientists have argued that most of our language acquisition can be explained by Linked learning, as we associate sound with sensitivity, just as dogs associate the sound of a bell with food. Others argue that there are features built into the human mind that shape the form of every language and are important to our learning. Still others say toddlers build Their understanding of new words builds on their understanding of other words.
This presentation took place on a recent Sunday morning, as Tammy Kwan and Brenden Lake transferred raspberries from a bowl into the mouth of their 21-month-old daughter, Luna. Luna wears pink leggings and a pink tutu, with a silicone bib around her neck and a fluffy pink hat on her head. A lightweight GoPro-type camera is mounted on the front.
“Babooga,” she said, pointing a round finger at the berry. Dr. Kwan gave her the rest, and Dr. Lake looked at the empty bowl, amused. “About $10,” he said. The light on the camera flashes.
For one hour every week for the past 11 months, Dr. Lake, a psychologist at New York University whose research focuses on human and artificial intelligence, attached a camera to Luna and recorded every stuff from her point of view as she plays. His goal is to use videos to train a language model using the same sensory input that toddlers are exposed to — the LunaBot, so to speak. By doing so, he hopes to create better tools to understand both AI and humans. “We see this study as finally creating a link between those two areas of research,” Dr. Lake said. “You can finally bring them into dialogue with each other.”
