For this experiment, the researchers relied on 61 hours of video from a helmet camera worn by a child who lives near Adelaide, Australia. That child, Sam, wore the camera off and on for one and a half years, from the time he was six months old until a little after his second birthday. The camera captured the things Sam looked at and paid attention to during about 1% of his waking hours. It recorded Sam's two cats, his parents, his crib and toys, his house, his meals, and much more. "This data set was totally unique," Lake says.

Recently, one of the researchers at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab was taking her 4-year-old son for a walk through the campus. The little boy looked up at the famous campanile clock tower and exclaimed with surprise and puzzlement, "There's a clock way up there!" Then, after a few minutes, he thoughtfully explained, "I guess they put the clock up there so that the children couldn't reach it and break it." Everyone with a 4-year-old has similar stories of preschool creativity--charming, unexpected takes on the world and its mysteries that nevertheless have their own logic and sense. Suppose you ask a Large Language Artificial Intelligence (AI) model the same question: Why is there a clock on top of the campanile?

If I drop a pen, you know that it won't hover in midair but will fall to the floor. Similarly, if the pen encounters a desk on its way down, you know it won't travel through the surface but will instead land on top. These fundamental properties of physical objects seem intuitive to us. Infants as young as three months know that a ball no longer in sight still exists and that the ball can't teleport from behind the couch to the top of the refrigerator. Despite mastering complex games, such as chess and poker, artificial intelligence systems have yet to demonstrate the "commonsense" knowledge that an infant is either born with or picks up seemingly without effort in their first few months.

If I drop a pen, you know that it won't hover in midair but will fall to the floor. Similarly, if the pen encounters a desk on its way down, you know it won't travel through the surface but will instead land on top. These fundamental properties of physical objects seem intuitive to us. Infants as young as three months know that a ball no longer in sight still exists and that the ball can't teleport from behind the couch to the top of the refrigerator. Despite mastering complex games, such as chess and poker, artificial intelligence systems have yet to demonstrate the "commonsense" knowledge that an infant is either born with or picks up seemingly without effort in their first few months.

Alison Gopnik is an internationally recognized expert in children's learning and development. Her new book The Gardener and the Carpenter is a response to the fact that "parenting" has become a verb, a powerful middle class trend, a lucrative self-help industry, and sometimes a kind of bloodsport. Meanwhile developmental science paints a very different picture of how children grow and learn, and what it means to be a good parent. As Gopnik puts it, "It's easy to say'just chill,' but the advice is, basically, just chill!" On this week's episode of Think Again–a Big Think Podcast, Alison Gopnik and host Jason Gots discuss play, artificial intelligence, and the trouble with "parenting" as a verb.

A study of screen time and mental wellbeing among teenagers has suggested moderate use of devices may be beneficial in a connected world. The researchers collected self-reported data from 120,000 English 15-year-olds about their digital device habits. They found a "Goldilocks effect" where a few hours of device-use seemed to boost mental wellbeing. One developmental psychologist welcomed the paper but said there was still room for more study. "Moderate engagement in digital activities is not harmful," notes the paper, published today in the journal Psychological Science.