Coherence statistics, self-generated experience and why young humans are much smarter than current AI.

Linda B. Smith, Distinguished Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, is an internationally recognized leader in cognitive science and cognitive development. Taking a complex systems perspective, she seeks to understand the interdependencies among perceptual, motor and cognitive developments during the first three years of post-natal life. Using wearable sensors, including head-mounted cameras, she studies how the young learner’s own behavior creates the statistical structure of the learning environments with a current focus on developmentally changing visual statistics at the scale of everyday life and their role in motor, perceptual, and language development. The work has led to novel insights about the statistics of self-generated experiences and their role in rapid learning and innovative generalization from sparse and limited experience and challenges current massive-data approaches in AI. The work also motivates her current efforts on defining and promoting a precision (or individualized) developmental science, one that determines the multiple causes and interacting factors that create children’s individual developmental pathways. Smith received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977 and immediately joined the faculty at Indiana University. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation and/or the National Institutes of Health since 1978. She won the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science, the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society, the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Koffka Medal. She is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science.