Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopmental events across species, however, it has been found that humans are not born with especially immature brains compared with animal species with a shorter helpless period. Consistent with this, the rapidly growing field of infant neuroimaging has found that brain connectivity and functional activation at birth share many similarities with the mature brain. Inspired by machine learning, where deep neural networks also benefit from a ‘helpless period’ of pre-training, we propose that human infants are learning a foundation model: a set of fundamental representations that underpin later cognition with high performance and rapid generalisation.

中文翻译：

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无助的婴儿正在学习基础模型


人类有一个漫长的产后无助期，通常归因于人类特有的母性限制，导致大脑高度不成熟时早产。然而，通过调整跨物种的神经发育事件，人们发现，与无助期较短的动物物种相比，人类并不是生来就拥有特别不成熟的大脑。与此相一致的是，快速发展的婴儿神经影像学领域发现，出生时的大脑连接和功能激活与成熟的大脑有许多相似之处。受机器学习的启发，深度神经网络也受益于预训练的“无助期”，我们提出人类婴儿正在学习一个基础模型：一组基本表征，以高性能和快速泛化支撑后来的认知。