Biography

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. The work has led to novel insights currently being extended through collaborations to robotics and artificial intelligence. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977 and immediately joined the faculty at Indiana University. She won the David E. Rumelhart Prize for theoretical contributions to cognitive science and is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Website: http://www.iub.edu/~cogdev

Brains and Bodies in the World Link the Data for Learning and the Mechanisms that do the Learning

Session Type: Invited Talk

Abstract

Infants’ own behaviors create and select experiences for learning. Those behaviors are created by neural networks that are also involved in learning from those infant generated experiences. This talk will focus on infant's learning about visual objects and the names of those objects, to illustrate how the internal mechanisms that generate behavior in time and create the data for learning are well aligned to the learning mechanisms engaged by those activities. Infant-generated data and the learning mechanisms are well-matched because the mechanisms that create the in-the-moment behaviors of infants overlap with the mechanisms that do the learning.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program

Moderator

• Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago

Speaker

• Linda B. Smith, Indiana University - Bloomington

Introducer

• Melina Lauryn Knabe, University of Wisconsin - Madison