Dream team: Tracey Mills (@traceym.bsky.social), Nicole Coates, Alessandra Silva (@alessandra-silva.bsky.social), Kaylee Ji, Steve Ferrigno (@sferrigno.bsky.social), Laura Schulz, Josh Tenenbaum.

Our results highlight program learning as a powerful, potentially distinctive, and early-emerging ability that humans deploy to learn structure. Our comparative/developmental results also raise many exciting questions—check out our paper for those + some speculations :). osf.io/preprints/ps...

We compared various Bayesian learning models with each population. The main takeaway: children as young as 4-years-old showed adult-like program induction on our task. Monkeys and 3-year-olds mostly used local extrapolation.

In contrast, despite extensive training on algorithmic patterns, the monkeys relied on a simpler local linear extrapolation to make predictions. Interestingly, 3-year-olds mostly used this same strategy—and their accuracy across patterns correlated with monkeys much more than with adults.

Consistent with a program-learning account, older children and adults' initial predictions typically show early multimodal uncertainty, but converge on the true pattern after only a handful of observations.

We found striking differences across both development and species in our task. Below are some examples of predicted continuations on various sequences in each population.

If participants are learning structured programs in an expressive “Language of Thought”, they should (1) be able to learn the sequences we tested by the final timepoint; but (2) show patterns of multimodal uncertainty reflective of possible algorithms that are consistent with the sequence so far.

One possibility is that we can “learn by programming” rapidly inferring structured algorithms to model our observations.

Our paper tests this ability in adults, 3-7yo children, and two rhesus macaques. Participants predicted how 2D sequences would unfold starting from the first few timepoints.

People seem wired to uncover hidden structure: we pick up the rules of games after a few turns, see figures in clouds and constellations, and riff on songs. What are the computational mechanisms that make this rapid structure learning possible?

Oh man I came across that years ago, it's nuts - was published in Science too!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

hopefully my first and last ever mildly political post. from here on out it's memes and papers

"this rendition emphasizes her eyes, carefully positioned to create the illusion of a gaze that follows you"

and ascii mona lisa