In a recent article in ScienceDaily they discussed some interesting findings. The researchers performing the test had 21 infants (11 months old) stare at a screen with a butterfly on it. The screen would introduce additional visual distractions and as soon as the child’s eyes left the butterfly, it would disappear. Over the course of the 15 day (5 visit) experiment, the child would focus (or concentrate) longer and longer on the butterfly over time. They found that as the child was trained to concentrate better, they showed improvements in other tasks as well such as pattern recognition. The researchers did note that in adults, the same kind of cross-functional benefits are not seen when they improve their abilities in a specific task. The same kind of improvement in concentration and pattern recognition was not seen in the other 21 infants in the experiment (the control group) who were just watching TV for 5 visits.
For those of us who are AI enthusiasts and are looking to the brain for hints, this provides another nugget of insight. It shows that fundamental skills are strongly inter-related and your ability to learn a task/skill is not independent from learning other tasks/skills. Given that the same result is not also present in adults, it shows that there is an element of “building the base” in the brain early on in life and that base of core skills is used to learn more advanced skills later in life. It supports the “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” philosophy in that when you are older you can’t change the base of knowledge you are working with to learn new skills. It’s as if you build the tools you’ll need as an infant and then you’re stuck with those for the rest of your life.