Learning (to Learn) from Attention Cues during Infancy

Rachel Wu
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck
University of London
  
Knowing what to learn in a cluttered environment is fundamental 
to all aspects of development. But how do infants know what to 
learn when faced with uncertain input? We know that both social 
and non-social attention-directing cues can shift infants’ 
attention. How do these attention cues mediate learning during 
infancy? I will present four eye-tracking studies with over 450 
infants demonstrating that infants’ ability to learn about 
structures in their environment (i.e., predicting the appearance 
of audiovisual events and forming expectations about co-occurring 
features) is dependent on the presence and nature of attention 
cues. By 8 months of age, infants learn these events better with 
social cues (e.g., eye gaze, infant-directed speech, expressions 
of interest) than with non-social cues (e.g., flashing squares) 
or without any attentional cueing. Importantly, when presented 
with multiple events to learn and cued by a face to one specific 
event, infants learned the cued event rather than the non-cued 
event. The last two studies trained infants to learn from 
unfamiliar attention cues (i.e., interactive objects [gaze-
contingent paradigm] and flashing squares). The findings from 
these studies provide evidence for a mechanism explaining how 
infants can learn to learn from unfamiliar cues such as pointing 
fingers or arrows in the real world. This research provides 
compelling evidence that attention cues shape infants’ learning 
in the typical cluttered environment, informing investigations 
on optimal strategies for learning to learn among distractions.