Infant engagement during guided play is a reliable indicator of early learning outcomes, psychiatric issues and familial wellbeing. An obstacle to using such information in real-world scenarios is the need for a domain expert to assess the data. We show that an end-to-end Deep Learning approach can perform well in automatic infant engagement detection from a single video source, without requiring a clear view of the face or the whole body. To tackle the problem of explainability in learning methods, we evaluate how four common attention mapping techniques can be used to perform subjective evaluation of the network’s decision process and identify multimodal cues used by the network to discriminate engagement levels. We further propose a quantitative comparison approach, by collecting a human attention baseline and evaluating its similarity to each technique.

Young children demonstrate the ability to make inferences about the preferences of other agents based on their choices. However, there exists no overarching account of what children are doing when they learn about preferences or how they use that knowledge. We use a rational model of preference learning, drawing on ideas from economics and computer science, to explain the behavior of children in several recent experiments. Specifically, we show how a simple econometric model can be extended to capture two- to four-year-olds’ use of statistical information in inferring preferences, and their generalization of these preferences.