Understanding infants' curiosity-based exploration

As parents know, babies are curious learners. The vast majority of infants' time is spent freely exploring (Oudeyer & Smith, in press), at home, at nursery or at playgroup. By sampling their learning environment based on their own curiosity infants quickly acquire two fundamental components of cognition without which they would never engage effectively with the world: categories and words. Understanding early category learning and how it interacts with word learning is therefore critical to teasing apart the complex processes by which infant cognition develops into an adult-like understanding of the world. However, although curiosity-driven exploration accounts for almost all of infants' experience, our understanding of category and word learning comes almost entirely from tightly-controlled, highly structured experiments. Decades of elegantly-designed studies show that these interacting phenomena are exquisitely sensitive to features of the environment (e.g., Younger, 1983; Plunkett, Hu & Cohen, 2008; Quinn, Eimas & Rosenkrantz, 1993). Because these experiments typically take place in artificial laboratory conditions, however, we do not know how babies themselves choose to learn, and as a consequence, we do not know the best way to help them do so.

Here I propose the first studies of infants' curiosity-based exploration and word learning. Using cutting-edge head-mounted eyetrackers I will record typically-developing infants interacting freely with objects, generating the first detailed description of curiosity-based exploration and laying the foundation for future research in atypical exploration. Objects will be custom-designed to vary systematically (e.g., in shape), allowing me to record exploratory sequences to reveal what level of complexity infants prefer to learn from. Half the infants will hear labels for the objects and be tested on their word learning, revealing how categorisation and word learning interact in an infant-centred, rather than adult-designed, environment.

For a complete understanding of infants' exploration, however, we not only need to know what infants do, but also how they do it: what mechanisms drive curiosity? Computational models can clarify the cognitive processes underlying a behaviour (McClelland et al., 2010). However, as yet we have no model of infants' curiosity-driven exploration and word learning. Based on my existing modelling work (Twomey & Westermann, 2015), I will develop the first testable, mechanistic theory of curiosity-based exploration and word learning in infants.

As the first investigation of human infants' curiosity-driven category and word learning this research has clear academic impact (papers, conferences, future studies of atypical exploration, collaborations). It also has societal impact: my findings will inform policymakers' understanding of development, help designers create evidence-based books and toys that facilitate learning, and equip parents and early years practitioners with the knowledge they need to support babies' cognitive development. There will be numerous opportunities to build networks and develop my knowledge exchange skills (e.g., data sharing, publications, conferences, talks) and public engagement experience (e.g., writing news articles, organising public engagement events). In parallel I will undertake a programme of researcher and Principal Investigator development at my RO. To cement my position as an innovator in curiosity research I will visit the INRIA Research Institute to learn to implement curiosity-based learning in the Poppy humanoid robot, becoming the first UK researcher to use Poppy and providing scope for designing future studies far beyond the current work. Finally, recruiting and supervising a research assistant will develop my leadership and mentorship skills. Overall, this project will not only prepare me for founding my own group, but will also secure my unique position as an international leader in curiosity research.

Who will benefit from the proposed project?

Understanding infants' exploration and its relationship to language acquisition is critical to our understanding of development more broadly, yet infants' curiosity has not been studied. By examining how infants drive their own learning the proposed work will be of substantial benefit to parents, policymakers, early years educators, industry and academia.

How will these communities benefit?

- Parents. The findings will alert parents to the fact that infants are self-driven learners and that the environment in which this learning takes place is important. This take-home message, as well as more detailed findings during the course of the research, will be communicated to parents visiting the Babylab to take part in the empirical studies, via post-study debriefing and printed/online materials, providing them with tools - and confidence - they need to successfully and independently support their babies' development and language learning.

- Policymakers and early years educators. "Planned, purposeful play" is at the core of the Department for Education's Statutory Framework For The Early Years (2014, p. 9), despite a lack of understanding of the mechanisms underlying this exploration. The planned work defines a pathway to developing principled, evidence-based guidelines for supporting learning through play.

- Members of the public. I will disseminate this work in a range of online and face-to-face venues. Online articles (e.g., The Conversation) and blog posts will discuss my findings and their implications for our understanding of development. Parents' days, science exploration days (with Science From The Start) drop-in sessions and nursery visits in the local Lancaster community will increase the visibility of developmental research and provide opportunities for the end-users of this research (i.e., parents) to speak directly to researchers in an informal setting. Overall, this research will bring about an increase in public understanding of infant development and language acquisition.

- Industry. A wealth of toys, books and apps marketed as "educational" are targeted at the parents of babies and toddlers, but as yet none are designed based on scientific evidence. Findings from this project will enable the design of books, apps and toys which provide optimal learning opportunities for a given age group.

- Academia. The proposed work will result in a substantial theoretical advance in developmental psychology as well generating the first knowledge base on infant's curiosity-driven exploration and word learning. It will define a new interdisciplinary field and as such will generate strong interest not only in psychology, but also in computational modelling and developmental robotics. Cross-disciplinary collaborations with roboticists at Aberystwyth University, UK, and INRIA, France, will drive forward our understanding of how artificial intelligence agents can benefit from incorporating insights from developmental psychology. These links will be strengthened and new collaborations inspired by an interdisciplinary curiosity symposium to be presented at a prestigious international conference. The research will also provide a baseline measure of curiosity-driven exploration in typically-developing infants, providing a vital comparison sample for researchers in atypical development.