Goldstone, R. L., Son, J. Y, & Byrge, L. (2011). Early perceptual learning. Infancy, 16, 45-51.
Bhatt and Quinn (2011) present a compelling case that human learning is early in two very different, but interacting, senses. Learning is developmentally early in that even infants show strikingly robust adaptation to the structures present in their world. Learning is also early in an information processing sense because infants’ adapt their perceptual encodings and organizations at an early stage of neural processing. Both senses of ”early” speak to the importance of learning because they imply that learners are adapting their representations of their environment in a way that affects all ”down-stream” processing. Developmentally speaking, the learning that an infant enacts serves as the groundwork for all subsequent learning. In terms of information processing, adapting early-stage sensory and perceptual processes in turn affects all subsequent cognitive processes. There is evidence from neuroscience that interactions with an environment do cause early changes to primarysensory cortices (Goldstone, 1998; Vogels, 2010). One might generally suppose that it is advisable to be conservative in making such environment driven cortical changes, given the ripples of influence caused by early learning in both senses. Manipulating grounding representations is a risky proposition. However, the evidence indicates that systems that need to respond effectively to their environment need to engage in both kinds of learning.