TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gumbsch, Christian
A1  - Adam, Maurits
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
A1  - Butz, Martin V.
T1  - Emergent goal-anticipatory gaze in infants via event-predictive learning and inference
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed agents. However, the underlying cognitive processes are still heavily debated. We propose that our minds (i) tend to structure sensorimotor dynamics into probabilistic, generative event-predictive, and event boundary predictive models, and, meanwhile, (ii) choose actions with the objective to minimize predicted uncertainty. We implement this proposition by means of event-predictive learning and active inference. The implemented learning mechanism induces an inductive, event-predictive bias, thus developing schematic encodings of experienced events and event boundaries. The implemented active inference principle chooses actions by aiming at minimizing expected future uncertainty. We train our system on multiple object-manipulation events. As a result, the generation of goal-anticipatory gaze shifts emerges while learning about object manipulations: the model starts fixating the inferred goal already at the start of an observed event after having sampled some experience with possible events and when a familiar agent (i.e., a hand) is involved. Meanwhile, the model keeps reactively tracking an unfamiliar agent (i.e., a mechanical claw) that is performing the same movement. We qualitatively compare these modeling results to behavioral data of infants and conclude that event-predictive learning combined with active inference may be critical for eliciting goal-anticipatory gaze behavior in infants.
KW  - Infancy
KW  - Goal-anticipatory gaze
KW  - Computational model
KW  - Event cognition
KW  - Active inference
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13016
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 45
IS  - 8
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Malden, Mass.
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tobin, Stephen J.
A1  - Nam, Hosung
A1  - Fowler, Carol A.
T1  - Phonetic drift in Spanish-English bilinguals: Experiment and a self-organizing model
JF  - Journal of phonetics
N2  - Studies of speech accommodation provide evidence for change in use of language structures beyond the critical/sensitive period. For example, Sancier and Fowler (1997) found changes in the voice-onset-times (VOTs) of both languages of a Portuguese-English bilingual as a function of her language context. Though accommodation has been studied widely within a monolingual context, it has received less attention in and between the languages of bilinguals. We tested whether these findings of phonetic accommodation, speech accommodation at the phonetic level, would generalize to a sample of Spanish-English bilinguals. We recorded participants reading Spanish and English sentences after 3–4 months in the US and after 2–4 weeks in a Spanish speaking country and measured the VOTs of their voiceless plosives. Our statistical analyses show that participants’ English VOTs drifted towards those of the ambient language, but their Spanish VOTs did not. We found considerable variation in the extent of individual participants’ drift in English. Further analysis of our results suggested that native-likeness of L2 VOTs and extent of active language use predict the extent of drift. We provide a model based on principles of self-organizing dynamical systems to account for our Spanish-English phonetic drift findings and the Portuguese-English findings.
KW  - Speech accommodation
KW  - Gestural drift
KW  - Phonetic drift
KW  - Bilingualism
KW  - Self-organization
KW  - Dynamical systems
KW  - Computational model
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2017.05.006
SN  - 0095-4470
VL  - 65
SP  - 45
EP  - 59
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - London
ER  -