Where Do Great Ideas Come From?
Background
Bayesian learning can explain remarkably complex real-world inference, but it is less clear where new priors originate. Babies and young children constantly generate fresh hypotheses about the world. How do they do this so effectively? And how might treating Bayesian learning as a developmentally conditioned process (shaped by agentic exploration, social interaction, and maturation) help explain where ideas come from?
Big Questions
- Many of our best ideas come when we least expect them. The harder we look, the more elusive creative solutions seem to become. But, what if we could use computational models to predict moments of insight? Could we reliably produce great ideas?
- Adults tend to converge on the right way to do something. To our detriment, we pre-screen possibilities through the lens of practicality. Children, on the other hand, explore the hypothesis space without regard for reality. What if we could be a little more like them—would we be more creative, imaginative, and innovative? Would we generate more great ideas?
Acute Changes to Childhood
Background
Children are spending more time interacting with adults and technology, and less time interacting with peers. Importantly, when children interact with peers, they co-construct knowledge with an intellectual equal. In contrast, adult-directed activities and virtual environments lead to more passive forms of learning. As a result, these acute changes to childhood may have important implications for children's cooperation, learning, exploration, and idea-generation. My research aims to understand how these shifts impact children's social and cognitive development, with the ultimate goal of informing educational practices and parenting strategies.
Big Questions
- How does adult presence and direction shape children's exploration and cooperative learning?
- What is the variability across children's information processing, construction, and discovery? How do acute changes to childhood shape this variability?
- How does living in a virtual environment impact children's social learning and cognitive flexibility?
