Total cognitive care for development of perfect baby brains

1
Total cognitive care fordevelopment of perfect
baby brains

• Wlodzislaw Duch
• Dept. of Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus
  University, PolandDept. of Computer Science,
  School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang
  Technological University, Singapore
• Google Duch

2
Plan

• Background cognitive infant development
• Few science facts
• Total cognitive infant care
• Toys that make you smart
• Techno remarks
• Plans strategy of development
• Endless possibilities ...

3
Developmental problems

• Brain is the most complex organ and frequently
  not functioning well.
• About 5-10 of all children have a developmental
  disability that causes a delay in their speech
  and language development.
• If serious hearing problems are not found in the
  first six months of life, and the baby given the
  appropriate treatment, that child will grow up
  with significant damage to his or her language
  abilities.
• Children with normal cognitive development whose
  hearing losses are identified before six months
  can develop language at the same or a similar
  rate to a hearing child. Identification of
  congenital hearing loss in USA is at 2½ years of
  age!
• The British Dyslexia Association estimates that
  10 of children have some degree of dyslexia,
  while about 4 will be affected severely (an
  average of one in every class).

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Cognitive development

• Brain the ultimate engineering problem! How to
  improve it?
• Although genes set a limit for potential
  individual development this limit is never
  reached genetic manipultion is dangerous. Early
  development is critical for unfolding brains
  potential.
• Challenge prevent abnormalities and boost normal
  development.
• Since genes specify only roughly where neurons
  should go (ex eye to visual cortex, across the
  whole brain) too many neurons are created, and
  those unused die (apoptosis). Maximum number of
  neurons 1-2 month before birth, although
  infants brain is only ¼ of the final size.
• General principle growing up is specializing
  narrowing potential possibilities. How to keep
  more possibilities open?

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Example motor development

• Duke University, NC, 2002 velcro-covered mittens
  help 2-3 month infants develop more quickly.
• Infants are no yet able to grasp objects, but
  velcro mittens help them to catch and then touch
  toysthis speeds up motor coordination and
  perceptual development.
• Babies who had experience with the mittens
  outperformed the babies who didn't in a number of
  ways.
• Long-term consequences of this procedure are
  investigated by psychologists. News shown by CNN
  and elsewhere in this area it is easy to get a
  free press ...
• Lynn-Flynn effect IQ grows everywhere in the
  world, 24 points in USA since 1918, 27 points in
  UK.Toys and nutrition help to develop better
  brains?

6
Infant communication

• Brain is capable of learning, but poor sensory
  analysis and motor coordination makes it
  difficult to communicate with infants.
• High-amplitude suction-methods are used with
  newborns and infants to find how much interest
  they have in different stimuli.
• Sign-language for communication with infants (US
  patent) using simple signs with babies to
  bridge the gap between understanding and speech
  development
• Recommendations of developmental psychologists
  pre-natal stimulation BabyPlus enhanced
  heartbeat, playing music to babies in the womb.
  Playing tapes with foreign language lullabies
  etc.
• All this is passive learning, much less effective
  than interactive learning in which the infant is
  actively engaged. Can one learn walking just by
  observation?
• Learning to perceive, speaking and drawing
  inferences should be active, guided by
  well-structured inputs and positive feedback.

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Speech perception facts

• Speech perception is based on syllables,
  combinations of elementary phonemes 2-month old
  recognize syllables.
• There are about 6800 languages, but only 800
  phonemes.
• The ability to hear phonetic contrasts of all
  possible human languages is in-born, 6 month old
  are good in any language.
• This ability declines sharply 10 month after
  birth, only the ability to distinguish contrast
  in languages that are spoken to the child is
  preserved one of the earliest specializations.
• At 5 month children are able to categorize a
  vowel in a speaker-independent way.
• Learning many languages correlates positively
  with IQ
• Tonal languages, prevalent in Asia, are
  phonetically rich, but even simple /ra/-/la/
  contrast is impossible for Japanese, /vi/-/bi/
  for Spanish, /s/-/th/ for most non-English native
  speakers.

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Phonemes

• Vowels spoken by 97 speakers, seen in the first 2
  formants only.
• Mapping to the auditory cortex looks similar.
• Categorical perception means that what we hear
  jumps from a to e with no gradation between.
• ma ma diff?

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Speech problems

• Up to 4 million primary and secondary school
  students in USA have difficulty distinguishing
  between phonemes, particularly between consonants
  like b, d and p is it pee or bee, pun or bun?
• Fast ForWord software by Scientific Learning
  helps to develop learning skills for 4-7 year
  olds. It is used in the Chicago public school
  system.
• Private clinicians provide Fast ForWord training
  (gt2,500).It shows remarkable success with kids
  who suffer from central auditory processing
  disorder that leads to speech understanding
  problems and retards reading.
• Big market Learning Company, the producer of
  Reader Rabbit, was acquired by Mattel for 3.5
  billion.
• Can we eliminate hearing and speech problems
  improving perceptual and cognitive skills of
  babies at the same time?

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Active stimulator of brains speech centers,
especially infant and children

• Application no 184102, date 29.07.1997,
  granted 30.08.2002
• Creator and the sole rights holder Duch
  Wlodzislaw, Torun, PL
• Active stimulator of brains speech centers,
  especially infant and children, with input
  device, analog-digital converter, memory
  containing phonemic patterns, comparator of
  phonemes received through inputs and retrieved
  from the memory, logical decision unit,
  digital-analog converter, and the output device
  for sound. The input device connects to the
  analog-digital converter, this converter is
  connected to one input of the comparator, another
  input of the comparator connects to the memory
  containing phonemic patterns, and the
  comparators output is connected to a logical
  decision unit the output from this unit connects
  with the sound producing device through the
  digital-analog converter.

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US5893720 abstract

• Hannah R Cohen (US) 1999 patent
• A computer toy for infants that promotes normal
  speech development by facilitating the infant's
  experimentation with babbles and other elementary
  sounds. Additionally, the toy provides an
  enriched environment for language learning by
  prompting the infant with a repertoire of verbal
  sounds including phonemes, syllables, and simple
  spoken words. The toy includes a microphone
  input device for detecting vocalizations by an
  infant and an audiovisual output device for
  providing feedback to the infant including the
  immediate playback of the infant's own
  vocalizations, and a control means for
  transforming detected vocalizations into
  instructions for use by the audiovisual output
  device.
• Philips Magic Mirror is based on this
  principle.

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Philips Magic Mirror

• Some companies are going in this direction,
  making interactive toys, for example

Magic Mirror introduced in 2003 Records and
replays babys voice, triggers first speech
sounds and has mirror, pushing buttons produces
some sounds, encourages experimentation. It is
not aimed at enhancing specific perceptual
skills.
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Total cognitive care

• Observe the baby and interpret his/her behavior
  by monitoring vocalization, sucking response,
  movements, GSR etc.
• Challenge the baby to solve perceptual/abstract
  problems. Use natural audio-visual-tactile
  stimulation.
• Reward behaviors that correlate with differences
  in stimuli.For example, if a series of sounds is
  playedla la la la ra ra ra ra, reaction to
  la-ra change shows that the baby has noticed an
  important phonetic contrast.
• PerCog devices for enhancement and therapy of
  perceptual and cognitive skills use intelligent
  AI control to model what the baby has already
  learned, what and how often should be presented,
  observing, diagnosing, correcting and teaching
  infants.
• Hypothesis active learning should gently
  pressure babys brain to develop
  perceptual/cognitive skills in the desired
  direction.

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Toys for speech development

• Goal enhance phonematic hearing.
• Prepare a database of phonemes and syllables,
  present pairs that are similar, and if the infant
  notices phonetic contrasts, apply positive
  stimulation. Start with basic contrasts, end with
  subtle.
• The infant is not able to repeat speech sounds
  changes in the larynx, highly sophisticated
  control over vocal cords, are slower than neural
  development.
• Hypothesis 1) Early (10 month) specialization
  in correct discrimination of mother tongue
  phonetic contrast may be eliminated, giving the
  baby ability to learn any language she/he
  chooses.2) Sharper discrimination between basic
  phonemes should prevent some hearing and speech
  problems.

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Toys for musical ear

• Goal enhance musical hearing, develop perfect
  pitch.
• Only one person in 10.000 has perfect pitch
  adult professional musicians try to learn it but
  it is very hard.
• Prepare a database of musical sounds of different
  instruments at different pitch, present pairs of
  sound samples with few seconds of silence in
  between, reward for signaling that sounds were of
  the same pitch although tones may differ. Start
  with pure frequencies, move to more complex
  sounds and accords of several sounds.
• Hypothesis memory for absolute sound pitch
  should develop, increasing the ability to hear
  subtle musical structures.

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Toys for abstract thinking

• Goal enhance the ability to think!
• Infants habituated for 2 minutes with sentences
  like ga ti ga, li na li, of the ABA structure,
  recognize that wo fe wo has correct grammatical
  structure but wo wo fe does not.G. Marcus et
  al, Rule learning by seven-month-old infants,
  Science 1999, Vol. 283, pp. 77 80.
• Challenge the infant using sounds and color
  lights with structures of increasing complexity,
  reward for noticing differences.
• Hypothesis solving problems of this kind has
  strong influence on development of the cortex, in
  particular frontal and temporal areas, and should
  increase working memory span, that correlates
  well with general IQ.

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More PerCog devices

• Goal enhance perceptual discrimination in all
  modalities, improve categorical perception,
  increase working memory span, long-term
  perceptual memory, encourage abstractions and
  faster reactions.
• Responses to stimuli, behavioral interaction
  patterns should allow for early diagnosis of
  developmental problems.

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Imagine ...

• A world in which people could communicate
  without problems and even adults learn languages
  easily.
• A world in which developmental abnormalities
  related to speech and reading would largely
  vanish.
• A world much more rich in subtle sensory
  experiences.
• A world in which the potential of each child
  would always fully develop, and natural curiosity
  will grow ...
• We just have to start quite early, adding
  structure to the development of the brain in a
  natural, effortless way.
• This is possible with PerCog devices, such as
  cognitive toys!
• Guess what is the market for such devices?

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So far

• Polish patent application was restricted to
  phoneme perception, the present proposal is much
  wider and differs in important aspects.
• We have made some research assuming that the main
  feedback from the infant will be via
  vocalization phonemes from 28 languages have
  been collected, software to present them,
  recognize change from silence/speech and
  vowel/consonant change in babys vocalization has
  been used this is done by microphone and speaker
  connected to PC sound card.
• Sucking (HAS), head turning preference, visual
  fixation and other procedures used by
  psychologists for infants lt 6 month are better.
• Some work on hardware implementation has been
  done, but it still requires a PC to analyze the
  data hardware working prototype due to technical
  problems.

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Roadmap

• First personalized medicine device, not related
  to molecular level adapts to the individual
  needs/abilities.
• Patent application Devices for enhancement and
  therapy of perceptual and cognitive skills of
  infants and children for all kinds of PerCog
  devices and total cognitive care of infants.
• Ready for quick commercialization and more RD.
  Largest market for speech devices is in the Far
  East, in the USA more prevention/diagnosis/treatme
  nt of speech/reading problems.
• Construction of PerCog devices in form of
  electronic toys or crib environments, initially
  with a modest number of phonemes covering basic
  phonetic contrasts, is not difficult.
• Computer games for babies and children may be
  created using the same principle.

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Research opportunities

• Interdisciplinary group including experts in
  developmental psychology, phonetics,
  neurolinguistics, speech/hearing/language
  pathologist, education experts, signal
  processing, electronics (sensors IC), toy
  design, software development, data mining ...
• Creation of larger phonetic databases most
  important phonetic contrasts for major languages,
  syllables and words which are hard to
  distinguish, like van/ban, thick/sick, extending
  it to cover subtle differences, and finally full
  spectrum of speech sounds.
• Improvement of the feedback recognition systems
  wireless sucking monitoring devices, analysis of
  infant babbling for sounds that infants may use
  for signaling, observation of movements.
• Follow-up studies to investigate the effect of
  using cognitive speech toys on phonetic contrast
  perception (a few month), language learning
  (long-term studies) and reduction of speech and
  reading abnormalities (long-term).

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Brave new world?

• New generation of children may grow up to be
• much more intelligent than we are
• think much faster than we do
• be much more musical
• be free of speech and hearing problems
• be able to learn any language without accent
• see things we hardly notice
• ...
• Popular book The Scientist in the Crib, Alison
  Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Patricia K. Kuhl
  (William Morrow Company 1999.