Babies Ace Cognitive Tests, Leave AI in the Dust

Artificial Intelligence has been making significant strides in recent years, from speech recognition to self-driving cars. However, a recent study by New York University, published in the journal Cognition, suggests that newborns outperform AI in critical psychology tasks. This study highlights the importance of improving technology and identifying the limitations of AI.

Study Objectives!.. The study focused on the ability of infants to perceive the motivation behind an individual's gestures. Infants are fascinated by other people and can understand basic emotions and feelings. They develop human social intelligence through their ability to develop goals and preferences.

Research Method!.. The study contrasted infants with AI by conducting tests with 84 11-month-old babies using the "Baby Intuitions Benchmark" (BIB). The BIB is a set of six tasks that probe commonsense psychology and were created to test infant and machine intelligence. Infants observed videos with simple, animated shapes rolling around the screen, and human behavior and decision-making were simulated by retrieving objects displayed on the screen and other movements.

More Details!.. The team also constructed, trained, and tested learning-driven neural network models, or AI machines, that assist computers in identifying patterns and imitating human intelligence. The team found that newborns could discern human-like motives in simple actions and animated shapes. They were able to identify the retrieval of identical objects on the screen despite the constant environmental changes. Newborns stared at moving objects longer, indicating recognition. On the other hand, AI tools failed to exhibit any evidence of recognition.

The study's lead author, Moira Dillon, Ph.D., an assistant professor in New York University's Department of Psychology, said, "Current AI finds these inferences challenging to make." She further added, "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."

While AI has come a long way, humans still excel at critical psychology tasks like understanding and perceiving motivation behind gestures. Dillon concluded that a human infant's foundational knowledge may be limited and abstract, but it reflects our evolutionary inheritance, and it can accommodate any context or culture in which that infant might live and learn.

In conclusion, the study highlights the importance of improving AI and identifying its limitations. Researchers believe that integrating infants' intuitive knowledge into AI will pave the way for developing humanistic AI. Despite AI's progress, it is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done to close the gap between human and machine intelligence.