Three Ages and Three Intelligences: Explore/Exploit/Care

I argue that the evolution of human life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood and high level of investment in the young, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults. This exploration, in turn, depends on the equally distinctive human period of elderhood, which provides both care and teaching.

Event Type: 
Colloquium
Location: 
Zoom link will be provided before event date
Date: 
Friday, April 2, 2021
Time: 
11:10:00
To: 
12:30:00
Event Sponsor: 
Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Event Speakers: 
Alison Gopnik