Research on cognitive development has revealed that even the youngest minds detect and respond to events that adults find surprising. These surprise responses suggest that infants have a basic set of “core” expectations about the world that are shared with adults and other species. However, little work has asked what purpose these surprise responses serve. Here we discuss recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special opportunities for learning. Infants and young children make predictions about the world on the basis of their core knowledge of objects, quantities, and social entities. We argue that when these predictions fail to match the observed data, infants and children experience an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information. This impact of surprise on learning is not equipotent. Instead, it is directed to entities that are relevant to the surprise itself; this drive propels children—even infants—to form and test new hypotheses about surprising aspects of the world. We briefly consider similarities and differences between these recent findings with infants and children, on the one hand, and findings on prediction errors in humans and non‐human animals, on the other. These comparisons raise open questions that require continued inquiry, but suggest that considering phenomena across species, ages, kinds of surprise, and types of learning will ultimately help to clarify how surprise shapes thought.
The basis for all knowledge is “information” that we compile about the world, expressed through models that support understanding, prediction, and decision making. This overview paper provides a contextual basis for the four papers that make up the “debate series” compiled under the above title. We briefly introduce Information Theory, discuss how “information” can be considered to be both a “physical” quantity and a “probabilistic” basis for representing incompleteness in knowledge, discuss the core motivation for this debate series, and briefly summarize the major arguments advanced by each of the debate papers. Our purpose is to facilitate an understanding of how these papers are related and how they approach the debate series question from different perspectives, while pointing to future directions for research. Finally, we invite further discourse and debate to advance the understanding and prediction of natural system dynamics using Information Theory, including the assessment of its limitations and complementarity to existing physics and machine learning approaches. Ultimately, our goal is to press for the development of philosophical and methodological advances that will enable the Earth science community to address some of the compelling unsolved problems in our field.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1740858
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10359797
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Water Resources Research
- Volume:
- 56
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0043-1397
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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