Communications of the ACM
Surprising Study Finds Infants Outperform AI in 'Commonsense Psychology'
According to a new research study, infants outperform artificial intelligence in detecting what motivates other people’s actions.
Credit: SciTechDaily
Infants outperform artificial intelligence in detecting what motivates other people's actions, finds a new study by a team of psychology and data science researchers. Its results, which highlight fundamental differences between cognition and computation, point to shortcomings in today's technologies and where improvements are needed for AI to more fully replicate human behavior.
"Adults and even infants can easily make reliable inferences about what drives other people's actions," explains Moira Dillon, an assistant professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, that was published on February 16 in the journal Cognition. "Current AI finds these inferences challenging to make."
"The novel idea of putting infants and AI head-to-head on the same tasks is allowing researchers to better describe infants' intuitive knowledge about other people and suggest ways of integrating that knowledge into AI," she adds.
"If AI aims to build flexible, commonsense thinkers like human adults become, then machines should draw upon the same core abilities infants possess in detecting goals and preferences," says Brenden Lake, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and one of the paper's authors.
From New York University
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