Individual differences in infants’ cognitive abilities underlying learning

Abstract

Infants possess sophisticated learning strategies. Nevertheless, it is still unknown to what extent infants differ in these strategies and the cognitive factors underlying them. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian cognitive model to infer individual differences in infants’ learning and attention from their looking behavior. Using this model, we replicated previous findings showing that infants tailor their attention depending on the learning progress offered by environmental stimuli. However, limitations in our data did not allow us to find individual differences in infants’ cognitive abilities. We conclude that the current model holds promise to find individual differences if coupled with richer eye-tracking measures. Keywords: individual differences, statistical learning, curiosity, learning progress, Bayesian cognitive modelling