When we are babies, we place a lot of demands on ourselves. Regardless, we must grow from sensory organs to flexible, rational, attentive communicators in just a few years. You are a baby with no vocabulary in a room filled with toys and stuffed animals. You pick up a Lincoln log and your caregiver tells you, “This is a ‘log.'” Eventually you learn that “log” doesn’t strictly refer to this specific brown plastic cylinder or to brown plastic cylinders in general. bodies, but rather refers to the brown plastic cylinders that embody the character of felled, exposed tree parts, which are, of course, also “logs”.
There has been much research and heated debate about how babies achieve this. Some scientists believe that much of our language acquisition can be explained by: associative learning, just as we associate sounds with feelings, just as dogs associate the sound of a bell with food. Others claim that certain features of the human mind shape the form of all language and are crucial to our learning.Some people think that young children put up They understand new words better than other words.
The conversation took place on a recent Sunday morning as Tammy Kwan and Brenden Lake placed a bowl of blackberries in the mouth of their 21-month-old daughter, Luna. Luna is wearing pink leggings, a pink tutu, a silicone bib around her neck and a soft pink hat on her head. A lightweight GoPro-type camera is mounted on the front.
“Babuga,” she said, pointing at the berries with her round finger. Dr. Guan gave her the rest, and Dr. Lake looked at the empty bowl, amused. “It’s about $10,” he said. The light on the camera flashes.
Dr. Lake, an NYU psychologist whose research focuses on humans and artificial intelligence, has spent one hour a week for the past 11 months attaching a camera to Luna to record her from the perspective of her playing. His goal is to use these videos to train language models using the same sensory input as young children — a LunaBot, so to speak. In doing so, he hopes to create better tools for understanding artificial intelligence and ourselves. “We think this study finally establishes a link between these two areas of research,” Dr. Lake said. “You can finally get them talking to each other.”
