Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

Author(s)
Moritz Köster, Ezgi Kayhan, Miriam Langeloh, Stefanie Hoehl
Abstract

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration-getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one's own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants' motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants' basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants' early learning processes in theory, research, and application.

Organisation(s)
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology
External organisation(s)
Freie Universität Berlin (FU), Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften, Scientific Software Center, Kyoto University, Universität Potsdam
Journal
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Volume
15
Pages
562-571
No. of pages
10
ISSN
1745-6916
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619895071
Publication date
05-2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
501005 Developmental psychology
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Psychology(all)
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/making-sense-of-the-world-infant-learning-from-a-predictive-processing-perspective(fb22f799-aff0-44df-8c9f-42e003881e9b).html