Caregiver Talk Shapes Toddler Vision: A Computational Study of Dyadic Play

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Schaumlöffel, Timothy, Aubret, Arthur, Roig, Gemma, Triesch, Jochen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Schaumlöffel, Timothy
Aubret, Arthur
Roig, Gemma
Triesch, Jochen
author_facet Schaumlöffel, Timothy
Aubret, Arthur
Roig, Gemma
Triesch, Jochen
contents Infants' ability to recognize and categorize objects develops gradually. The second year of life is marked by both the emergence of more semantic visual representations and a better understanding of word meaning. This suggests that language input may play an important role in shaping visual representations. However, even in suitable contexts for word learning like dyadic play sessions, caregivers utterances are sparse and ambiguous, often referring to objects that are different from the one to which the child attends. Here, we systematically investigate to what extent caregivers' utterances can nevertheless enhance visual representations. For this we propose a computational model of visual representation learning during dyadic play. We introduce a synthetic dataset of ego-centric images perceived by a toddler-agent that moves and rotates toy objects in different parts of its home environment while hearing caregivers' utterances, modeled as captions. We propose to model toddlers' learning as simultaneously aligning representations for 1) close-in-time images and 2) co-occurring images and utterances. We show that utterances with statistics matching those of real caregivers give rise to representations supporting improved category recognition. Our analysis reveals that a small decrease/increase in object-relevant naming frequencies can drastically impact the learned representations. This affects the attention on object names within an utterance, which is required for efficient visuo-linguistic alignment. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that caregivers' naming utterances can improve toddlers' visual representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_04118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Caregiver Talk Shapes Toddler Vision: A Computational Study of Dyadic Play
Schaumlöffel, Timothy
Aubret, Arthur
Roig, Gemma
Triesch, Jochen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Infants' ability to recognize and categorize objects develops gradually. The second year of life is marked by both the emergence of more semantic visual representations and a better understanding of word meaning. This suggests that language input may play an important role in shaping visual representations. However, even in suitable contexts for word learning like dyadic play sessions, caregivers utterances are sparse and ambiguous, often referring to objects that are different from the one to which the child attends. Here, we systematically investigate to what extent caregivers' utterances can nevertheless enhance visual representations. For this we propose a computational model of visual representation learning during dyadic play. We introduce a synthetic dataset of ego-centric images perceived by a toddler-agent that moves and rotates toy objects in different parts of its home environment while hearing caregivers' utterances, modeled as captions. We propose to model toddlers' learning as simultaneously aligning representations for 1) close-in-time images and 2) co-occurring images and utterances. We show that utterances with statistics matching those of real caregivers give rise to representations supporting improved category recognition. Our analysis reveals that a small decrease/increase in object-relevant naming frequencies can drastically impact the learned representations. This affects the attention on object names within an utterance, which is required for efficient visuo-linguistic alignment. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that caregivers' naming utterances can improve toddlers' visual representations.
title Caregiver Talk Shapes Toddler Vision: A Computational Study of Dyadic Play
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04118