Séminaire Gert WESTERMANN

Much of what we know about infants' cognitive development comes from studies in which infants are passive recipients of information presented to them on a computer screen in an order and duration determined by the experimenter. While this body of work has provided us with many insights about infants' learning and their cognitive abilities, these methods ignore a fundamental aspect of real-life learning: outside the lab, infants are actively involved in their learning through exploring their environment and engaging with information in the order and duration they choose. In our lab we investigate infants' information seeking using behavioural, eye tracking, EEG and computational modelling methods. Here I will provide an overview of our work in this field to show that infants' active information seeking is systematic and goal directed, and I will propose that it can be understood as an outcome of interactions between the infant's internal knowledge state and the information structure of the environment. I will then discuss a theory of how curiosity relates to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in acquiring knowledge about the world.