Learning Cue Combination

人们经常需要同时处理多个信息流。例如，想象你在树林里散步，试图找到一种稀有的鸟。你听到一声鸟叫（音频信息）并转向它。你可以看到一些树叶在树上移动（视觉信息）。这两种信息流都不是完全可靠的--当你试图确定声音的位置时，你会倾向于犯这样或那样的错误，你不知道鸟到底在哪片叶子后面--但这两种信息都是有用的。我们在实验室里看到的，当我们把这些任务交给成年人时，被称为“最佳提示组合”。成年人倾向于以一种“最佳”的方式联合收割机所有不同的“线索”，使他们尽可能接近正确的位置。要做到这一点，他们必须考虑每个线索的可靠性，根据其可靠性对每个线索进行加权，然后取加权平均值。发展心理学家发现，孩子们直到10岁或11岁才开始这样做;在此之前，他们似乎只是忽略了一个或另一个线索（例如Nardini，贝德福德和Mareschal，2010）。这是令人惊讶的，因为在这些研究中，孩子们拥有他们做出更准确判断所需的所有信息。他们只是未能以正确的方式将信息联合收割机组合起来。我们想知道原因。10-11岁时发生了什么变化，使他们能够开始进行最佳提示组合？我们将研究两个大的想法，可能会提供很好的答案这个难题。第一，10-11岁的孩子可能会获得一种新的能力。他们可能首先在这个年龄发展了学习如何将线索放在一起的能力。第二个想法是，它可能归结为孩子们试图平均在一起的单个线索的质量。通常来说，用带有强烈偏见（系统性错误）的线索进行“最佳线索组合”是一个坏主意--在这种情况下，忽略带有偏见的线索更有意义。即使一个提示不是严格意义上的偏见，它也可能是如此嘈杂，以至于很难学习它是如何工作的。这可能是因为10-11岁以下的儿童没有表现出最佳的线索组合，因为他们可用的个人线索都太有偏见或嘈杂。为了验证这些想法，我们将测试他们做出的几个预测。例如，我们应该能够尽可能多地训练7-9岁的儿童，他们永远不应该学习提示组合;我们应该能够通过诱导儿童般的偏见来防止成年人学习新提示组合。这两个大的想法可能都是正确的--可能是孩子们需要一种新的能力，个人的暗示也需要改进。这项工作将通过我们实验室特别为这个项目开发的新方法的组合来实现，包括测试和训练孩子们的联合收割机组合感官的能力，以及在沉浸式虚拟现实中学习一种全新的”感觉“。这项工作将是有趣的认知科学家，特别是那些有兴趣在发展和教育。它将帮助我们设计更好的未来干预措施，为感官丧失的儿童教授额外的感官。它将使我们更好地了解使用多种线索如何对儿童时期的培训做出反应，这对安全导向的组织来说很有意义，因为安全过马路等许多行为都依赖于多种感官（看到和听到交通）。设计教育测试的人也会感兴趣，因为我们将继续开发一个重要的感官里程碑的新测试，并向人们展示如何在其他教育领域设计类似的有效测试。

People often have to deal with multiple streams of information at once. For example, imagine you are on a walk out in the woods trying to find a kind of rare bird. You hear a bird call (audio information) and turn towards it. You can see some leaves moving around in a tree (visual information). Neither stream of information is perfectly reliable -- you will tend to make some error one way or another when you try to pinpoint the sound location, and you don't know exactly which leaf the bird was behind -- but both are useful pieces of information. What we see in the lab when we give these kinds of tasks to adults is called 'optimal cue combination'. Adults tend to combine all the different 'cues' available in an 'optimal' way that gets them as close as possible to the right location. To do this, they have to take into account how reliable each cue is, weight each cue by its reliability, and then take a weighted average. Developmental Psychologists have found that children don't begin doing this until they are about 10 or 11 years old; before that, they seem to just ignore one cue or the other (e.g. Nardini, Bedford & Mareschal, 2010). This is surprising because in these studies, children have all the information they need to make more accurate judgments. They are just failing to combine the information in the right way. We want to know why. What is changing at 10-11 years old that allows them to start doing optimal cue combination?We are going to examine two big ideas that might provide good answers to this puzzle. First, children at 10-11 might gain a new ability. They might first develop the ability to learn how to put cues together at this age. The second idea is that it might come down to the quality of the individual cues that children are trying to average together. It's generally a bad idea to do 'optimal cue combination' with a cue that is strongly biased (systematically incorrect) -- in that case, it makes more sense to ignore the biased cue. Even if a cue is not strictly-speaking biased, it might also be so noisy that it is hard to learn how it works. It could be that children under 10-11 years don't show optimal cue combination because the individual cues that they have available are all too biased or noisy. To test these ideas, we will test several predictions that they make. For example, we should be able to train children at 7-9 years as much as we want and they should never learn cue combination; we should be able to prevent adults from learning cue combination with a new cue by inducing child-like biases. It is possible that both of these big ideas might be correct -- it could be that children need a new ability and that the individual cues also have to improve.This work will be made possible by a combination of methods newly developed in our lab especially for this project, including testing and training children's abilities to combine the senses, and to learn a completely "new" sense, in immersive virtual reality. The work will be interesting to cognitive scientists, especially those interested in development and education. It will help us design better future interventions to teach additional senses to children with sensory loss. It will give us a better understanding of how the use of multiple cues responds to training in childhood, which is of interest to safety-oriented organizations since so many behaviours like safe road crossing can rely on multiple senses (seeing and hearing traffic). It will also be of interest to people who design educational tests since we will continue to develop our new test of a major sensory milestone and show people how similar efficient tests can be designed in other areas of education.