Why a Cognitive Scientist Put a Head Cam on His Baby

When Luna was seven months old, she began wearing, at the behest of her scientist father, a hot-pink helmet topped with a camera that would, for about an hour at a time, capture everything she saw, heard, and said.

Her dad, Brenden Lake, is a cognitive scientist at New York University, where he thinks about  better ways to train artificial intelligence. At home, he trains human intelligence, by which I just mean that he’s a dad. On a recent Sunday morning, he held up a robot puppet and asked Luna, who was meting out her wooden toys, “That’s for robot?” “Oh, goodness!” he added in a silly Muppet voice.

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That said, AI models could also inspire new ideas about how children learn. Chen Yu, a developmental psychologist at the University of Austin, told me about a study he conducted with his collaborators, in which parents and children wore head cams as they played with toys in a lab. 

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