full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Laura Schulz: The surprisingly logical minds of babies

Unscramble the Blue Letters

LS: Let me show you the experimental rsleuts. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's cicoehs in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two ftaleaumndnly different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and eporixnlg. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of leilralty heunddrs in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich ieenfnrces from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. cdleirhn learn about new tloos from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language.

Open Cloze

LS: Let me show you the experimental _______. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's _______ in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two _____________ different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and _________. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of _________ ________ in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich __________ from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. ________ learn about new _____ from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language.

Solution

  1. results
  2. hundreds
  3. inferences
  4. fundamentally
  5. choices
  6. exploring
  7. tools
  8. children
  9. literally

Original Text

LS: Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
blue balls 10
human minds 7
randomly sampled 3
tiny bit 3
show babies 3
yellow balls 3
statistical data 3
human cognition 2
children learn 2
causal reasoning 2
small samples 2
rubber ducks 2
develop expectations 2
plausibly representative 2
important point 2
box squeaks 2
experimental results 2
blue ball 2
causal relationships 2
big idea 2
machine learning 2
small amounts 2
data human 2
minds generate 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
data human minds 2
human minds generate 2

Important Words

  1. ability
  2. acting
  3. american
  4. axis
  5. babies
  6. bit
  7. case
  8. causal
  9. children
  10. choices
  11. condition
  12. critical
  13. cultural
  14. data
  15. decide
  16. depends
  17. distribution
  18. evidence
  19. examples
  20. experimental
  21. experiments
  22. exploring
  23. field
  24. fundamentally
  25. hundreds
  26. inferences
  27. laboratory
  28. language
  29. learn
  30. learning
  31. life
  32. literally
  33. observe
  34. point
  35. points
  36. relationships
  37. results
  38. rich
  39. show
  40. shown
  41. sign
  42. similar
  43. sparse
  44. statistical
  45. strategies
  46. tiny
  47. tools
  48. underlies
  49. vertical
  50. words
  51. year