Cognition & AI
Your Baby Is Recruiting Your Eyes
Joint attention turns looking into a shared problem-solving loop. Here’s what infant brains, social robots, and a cardboard marble run reveal.
Tag: Embodied Cognition
11 articles
Cognition & AI
The Body Finishes the Lesson
Why children often understand instructions through action, feedback, and revision—and what embodied robots reveal about helping learning stick.
Cognition & AI
Your Preschooler Sees What AI Misses
Why children often generalize visual patterns better than powerful AI — and how parents can support the embodied, comparison-rich learning that builds flexible thinking.
Cognition & AI
Your Brain Wasn't Built to Read
Reading is an evolutionary hack — no brain region was born for it, and no child learns it without years of effortful, phonologically grounded work. LLMs never had to do any of that. The difference turns out to matter enormously.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Babies Learn to See. Cameras Never Had To.
A newborn's vision is 30x worse than a camera's. But two years later, the baby is doing something the camera will never do — actually understanding what it's looking at. Here's what visual development reveals about the gap between biological and artificial vision.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Your Baby Is a Self-Supervised Learner
Babies extract statistical patterns from the world without anyone teaching them — the same computational logic powering BERT, GPT, and DINO. The comparison is striking. The gap is more interesting.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Robots Grew Grid Cells. Your Brain Had Them First.
A two-year-old builds a spatial map of a playground in minutes. A deep RL robot navigating a virtual maze independently grew the same hexagonal grid-cell structure evolution put in the hippocampus. The convergence isn't coincidence — it's math.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Rhythm Is a Body Problem
Babies keep time before they can walk. AI generates music by counting tokens. The gap between these two things reveals something fundamental about what rhythm actually is — and why closing it matters.
Embodied Cognition & AI
AI Can Be Trained. Can It Be Taught?
Children are built to extract general principles from ostensive instruction — an evolved system that comes online at 9 months. AI systems can be trained on feedback, but they can't truly be taught. Here's the gap that matters most for every classroom deploying AI right now.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Your Baby's Rattle Is Smarter Than GPT-4V
Babies bind sight, sound, and touch into a single unified percept before they can sit up. State-of-the-art multimodal AI encodes each modality separately and calls it integration. Here's why the gap matters — and what it would actually take to close it.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Transformers Look. Children Pay Attention.
Transformers compute attention over millions of tokens simultaneously. Children pay attention through their bodies, their predictions, their mistakes. The gap between the two reveals something deep about what attention actually is — and why embodied AI keeps failing in kitchens.