Modeling U Shaped Performance Curves in Ongoing Development

This paper details a simple and general account, and model, of the U-shaped curve phenomena apparent in many developmental psychology experiments. The model replicates both the general form of the U-shape performance in ongoing development and accounts for additional observations in the psychology literature such as the effect of noise in Switch task experiments. This leads to predictions both in psychology and neuroscience, and establishes an alternative hypothesis, which is simpler, more detailed, more predictive, and more general than those already established in the literature. This approach is also suitable for embodied robotic modeling of development.