Children's Intelligence in Connections and Flexibility

I have a very young granddaughter, so I am alert to  examples of intelligence and how it can come about.  It is an old AI model,  if you could build a very flexible learning model, with the correct sensors to understand its environment in context,  you could learn your way to AI.  Like a human baby.   Still we have yet to do this for general and flexible situations.   Here something different yet, looking at the number of connections and their flexibility over time and learning.

A Separate Kind of Intelligence
A Talk By Alison Gopnik

 looks as if there’s a general relationship between the very fact of childhood and the fact of intelligence. That might be informative if one of the things that we’re trying to do is create artificial intelligences or understand artificial intelligences. In neuroscience, you see this pattern of development where you start out with this very plastic system with lots of local connection, and then you have a tipping point where that turns into a system that has fewer connections but much stronger, more long-distance connections. It isn’t just a continuous process of development. So, you start out with a system that’s very plastic but not very efficient, and that turns into a system that’s very efficient and not very plastic and flexible.

It’s interesting that that isn’t an architecture that’s typically been used in AI. But it’s an architecture that biology seems to use over and over again to implement intelligent systems. One of the questions you could ask is, how come? Why would you see this relationship? Why would you see this characteristic neural architecture, especially for highly intelligent species?

ALISON GOPNIK is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley. Her books include The Philosophical Baby and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children... "