Learning Cue Combination

人们经常不得不同时处理多个信息流。例如，想象你正在树林里散步，试图找到一种稀有的鸟。你听到鸟鸣(音频信息)，然后转向它。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--当你试图确定声音位置时，你往往会犯一些错误，而且你不知道鸟在哪片叶子后面--但这两种信息都是有用的信息。当我们把这些任务交给成年人时，我们在实验室中看到的被称为“最佳线索组合”。成年人倾向于以一种“最佳”的方式组合所有不同的“线索”，让他们尽可能接近正确的位置。要做到这一点，他们必须考虑每条线索的可靠性，根据其可靠性对每条线索进行加权，然后进行加权平均。发展心理学家发现，儿童在大约10岁或11岁时才开始这样做；在此之前，他们似乎只是忽略了这样或那样的暗示(例如，Nardini，Bedford&Mareschal，2010)。这很令人惊讶，因为在这些研究中，孩子们拥有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整合信息。我们想知道为什么。是什么让他们在10-11岁时开始进行最佳线索组合？我们将考察两个可能为这个谜题提供良好答案的大想法。首先，10-11岁的儿童可能会获得一种新的能力。在这个年龄，他们可能首先会发展出学习如何将线索组合在一起的能力。第二个想法是，这可能归结为孩子们试图平均在一起的单个线索的质量。通常情况下，用带有强烈偏向(系统不正确)的球杆进行最佳球杆组合不是一个好主意--在这种情况下，忽略偏向球杆更有意义。即使一条球杆没有严格意义上的偏见，它也可能噪音太大，很难了解它是如何工作的。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，因为他们所拥有的个别线索都太有偏见或太吵了。为了测试这些想法，我们将测试他们做出的几个预测。例如，我们应该能够在7-9岁的时候训练儿童，他们永远不应该学习线索组合；我们应该能够通过诱导儿童一样的偏见来防止成年人学习与新线索的组合。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，个别的线索也必须提高。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在沉浸式虚拟现实中组合感官的能力，并学习一种全新的感觉。认知科学家，特别是那些对发展和教育感兴趣的人，会对这项工作感兴趣。它将帮助我们设计更好的未来干预措施，向感觉丧失的儿童教授更多的感觉。它将让我们更好地理解在儿童时期使用多种线索对训练的反应，这是以安全为导向的组织所感兴趣的，因为许多行为，如安全过马路，可以依赖于多种感官(看到和听到交通)。这也会引起设计教育测试的人的兴趣，因为我们将继续开发我们的新测试，这是一个重要的感官里程碑，并向人们展示如何在其他教育领域设计类似的高效测试。

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.