Linda B. Smith, Swapnaa Jayaraman, Elizabeth Clerkin, Chen Yu, The Developing Infant Creates a Curriculum for Statistical Learning, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 22, Issue 4, 2018, Pages 325-336, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.02.004.
New efforts are using head cameras and eye-trackers worn by infants to capture everyday visual environments from the point of view of the infant learner. From this vantage point, the training sets for statistical learning develop as the sensorimotor abilities of the infant develop, yielding a series of ordered datasets for visual learning that differ in content and structure between timepoints but are highly selective at each timepoint. These changing environments may constitute a developmentally ordered curriculum that optimizes learning across many domains. Future advances in computational models will be necessary to connect the developmentally changing content and statistics of infant experience to the internal machinery that does the learning.