Uploaded September 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR
For previous recordings and upcoming talks visit prior.allenai.org/lectures
How do infants represent objects in physical events?
Yi Lin • NYU • (9/3/21)
Abstract:
How do infants represent and reason about objects in simple physical events, such as occlusion, containment, and support events? In this talk, I will first summarize three sets of puzzling and even seemingly contradictory findings from the past few decades of research on this question. First, young infants often succeed at tasks that require reasoning about broad, categorical information about an object, but fail at tasks that require reasoning about more fine-grained, featural information about the object. Second, when infants begin to succeed at tasks that require reasoning about particular featural information, they often do so with events from one category but still fail with events from another category. Finally, when infants begin to succeed at tasks that require reasoning about particular featural information in an event category, they often succeed at tasks that require detecting change or interaction violations, but still fail at detecting individuation violations. I will then present the two-system model of infant physical reasoning, in which two cognitive systems, the object-file system and the physical reasoning system, each with a different role, work together to guide infants’ response throughout the course of an event. I will show that this model helps integrate and explain the findings described above. I will end by briefly discussing novel predictions that the model makes and studies that tested these predictions.
Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR
For previous recordings and upcoming talks visit prior.allenai.org/lectures
How do infants represent objects in physical events?
Yi Lin • NYU • (9/3/21)
Abstract:
How do infants represent and reason about objects in simple physical events, such as occlusion, containment, and support events? In this talk, I will first summarize three sets of puzzling and even seemingly contradictory findings from the past few decades of research on this question. First, young infants often succeed at tasks that require reasoning about broad, categorical information about an object, but fail at tasks that require reasoning about more fine-grained, featural information about the object. Second, when infants begin to succeed at tasks that require reasoning about particular featural information, they often do so with events from one category but still fail with events from another category. Finally, when infants begin to succeed at tasks that require reasoning about particular featural information in an event category, they often succeed at tasks that require detecting change or interaction violations, but still fail at detecting individuation violations. I will then present the two-system model of infant physical reasoning, in which two cognitive systems, the object-file system and the physical reasoning system, each with a different role, work together to guide infants’ response throughout the course of an event. I will show that this model helps integrate and explain the findings described above. I will end by briefly discussing novel predictions that the model makes and studies that tested these predictions.
