Unnatural pedagogy : a computational analysis of children\u27s learning to learn from other people.

Infants rely on others for much of what they learn. People are a ready source of quick information, but people produce data differently than the world. Data from a person are a result of that person\u27s knowledgeability and intentions. People may produce inaccurate or misleading data. On the other hand, if a person is knowledgeable about the world and intends to teach, that person may produce data that are more useful than simply accurate data: data that are pedagogical. This idea that people have special innate methods for efficient information transfer lies at the heart of recent proposals regarding what makes humans such powerful knowledge accumulators. These innate assumptions result in developmental patterns observed in epistemic trust research. This research seeks to create a computational account of the development of these abilities. We argue that pedagogy is not innate, but rather that people learn to learn from others. We employ novel computational models to show that there is sufficient data early on from which infants may learn that people choose data pedagogically, that the development of children\u27s epistemic trust is primarily a result of their decreasing beliefs that all informants are helpful, and that innate pedagogy would not lead to more rapid learning. We connect results from the pedagogy and epistemic trust literatures across tasks and development, showing that these are different manifestations of the same underlying abilities, and show that pedagogy need not be innate to have powerful implications for learning

Epistemic trust: modeling children's reasoning about others' knowledge and intent

A core assumption of many theories of development is that children can learn indirectly from other people. However, indirect experience (or testimony) is not constrained to provide veridical information. As a result, if children are to capitalize on this source of knowledge, they must be able to infer who is trustworthy and who is not. How might a learner make such inferences while at the same time learning about the world? What biases, if any, might children bring to this problem? We address these questions with a computational model of epistemic trust in which learners reason about the helpfulness and knowledgeability of an informant. We show that the model captures the competencies shown by young children in four areas: (1) using informants’ accuracy to infer how much to trust them; (2) using informants’ recent accuracy to overcome effects of familiarity; (3) inferring trust based on consensus among informants; and (4) using information about mal-intent to decide not to trust. The model also explains developmental changes in performance between 3 and 4 years of age as a result of changing default assumptions about the helpfulness of other people.Patrick Shafto, Baxter Eaves, Daniel J. Navarro and Amy Perfor

Rumination in bipolar disorder: evidence for an unquiet mind

Depression in bipolar disorder has long been thought to be a state characterized by mental inactivity. However, recent research demonstrates that patients with bipolar disorder engage in rumination, a form of self-focused repetitive cognitive activity, in depressed as well as in manic states. While rumination has long been associated with depressed states in major depressive disorder, the finding that patients with bipolar disorder ruminate in manic states is unique to bipolar disorder and challenges explanations put forward for why people ruminate. We review the research on rumination in bipolar disorder and propose that rumination in bipolar disorder, in both manic and depressed states, reflects executive dysfunction. We also review the neurobiology of bipolar disorder and recent neuroimaging studies of rumination, which is consistent with our hypothesis that the tendency to ruminate reflects executive dysfunction in bipolar disorder. Finally, we relate the neurobiology of rumination to the neurobiology of emotion regulation, which is disrupted in bipolar disorder