Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper presents a process model of the acquisition and operation of early predictive behavior in young children, i.e., children's ability to accurately anticipate recurring sequences of events. The principal question that the model addresses is: how do children acquire predictive behavior from experience? The model presented here, called CEL (Components of Episodic Learning) provides an effective procedure for performing this acquisition process, and has been used as the basis for a prototype computer system running at the UCI Artificial Intelligence Project. The CEL model conforms to the constraints provided by relevant results in psychology and neurobiology; some observed stages of early child learning are explained in terms of the model, and theoretical lesions to specific parts of the model are used to predict particular behavior deficits that correspond well to documented defecits associated with lesions to the hippocampus of human patients.