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Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they require strong inductive biases? Recent advances in collecting large-scale, longitudinal, developmentally realistic video datasets and generic self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms are allowing us to begin to tackle this nature vs. nurture question. However, existing work typically focuses on image-based SSL algorithms and visual capabilities that can be learned from static images (e.g. object recognition), thus ignoring temporal aspects of the world. To close this gap, here we train self-supervised video models on longitudinal, egocentric headcam recordings collected from a child over a two year period in their early development (6-31 months). The resulting models are highly effective at facilitating the learning of action concepts from a small number of labeled examples; they have favorable data size scaling properties; and they display emergent video interpolation capabilities. Video models also learn more robust object representations than image-based models trained with the exact same data. These results suggest that important temporal aspects of a child's internal model of the world may be learnable from their visual experience using highly generic learning algorithms and without strong inductive biases. 

Spatial relations, such as above, below, between, and containment, are important mediators in children’s understanding of the world (Piaget, 1954). The development of these relational categories in infancy has been extensively studied (Quinn, 2003) yet little is known about their computational underpinnings. Using developmental tests, we examine the extent to which deep neural networks, pretrained on a standard vision benchmark or egocentric video captured from one baby’s perspective, form categorical representations for visual stimuli depicting relations. Notably, the networks did not receive any explicit training on relations. We then analyze whether these networks recover similar patterns to ones identified in development, such as reproducing the relative difficulty of categorizing different spatial relations and different stimulus abstractions. We find that the networks we evaluate tend to recover many of the patterns observed with the simpler relations of “above versus below” or “between versus outside”, but struggle to match developmental findings related to “containment”. We identify factors in the choice of model architecture, pretraining data, and experimental design that contribute to the extent the networks match developmental patterns, and highlight experimental predictions made by our modeling results. Our results open the door to modeling infants’ earliest categorization abilities with modern machine learning tools and demonstrate the utility and productivity of this approach.