1-yr-olds capable of complex reasoning?
Babies as young as one year old are capable of making judgements about the probability of an event they have never seen before, a new study has claimed.
Using a computer model, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US were able to predict accurately what a baby would know about a particular event if given certain information.
The model may be useful in engineering artificial intelligence that reacts appropriately to the world, said Josh Tenenbaum, a cognitive scientist at MIT who led the research.
“The deeper thing that this shows is that infants’ knowledge of objects is not a gut feeling. They’re actually doing some kind of rational, probabilistic reasoning,” he told LiveScience.
Past studies have shown that babies grasp all sorts of information and can even tell the difference between an angry and a friendly dog. These studies typically rely on a method called “violation in expectation” in which researchers monitor babies’ gazes as they look at normal and atypical scenarios.
But Tenenbaum and his colleagues wanted to go further quantifying how “surprising” a given event is based on the probability of it happening.
Then they wanted to see if the level of babies’ surprise matched the improbability of a given situation.
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Penguin India’s new publisher is Chiki Sarkar
New Delhi: Publishing house Penguin India on Friday announced appointment of Chiki Sarkar as its new publisher.
Sarkar, who was the inaugural editor-in-chief of Random House India since 2006, has worked with best-selling authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Rujuta Diwekar.
“We are thrilled that Chiki will be joining Penguin India on the eve of our 25th year. Not only is she incredibly bright, creative and driven but I believe she has the vision and passion to run one of the most exciting and prestigious publishing lists in the world,” CEO and president of Penguin India Andrew Phillips said.
“She is loved by her authors and widely respected on the international publishing scene and we feel lucky to have her join our team,” he said. —PTI
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