CONCEPT
Developmental Calibration
The sensitive-period process by which a developing nervous system establishes the baseline thresholds that will govern its reward evaluations for life — and the specific vulnerability of children growing up among supernormal stimuli.
Developmental neurobiology has established, through decades of research on sensitive periods in sensory and motivational systems, that neural circuits are most plastic during development and progressively less plastic with maturity. The stimulation environment during the calibration period establishes the baseline against which all subsequent stimulation is evaluated. A system calibrated by supernormal stimulation establishes a supernormal baseline; normal-range stimulation that would have been fully adequate to drive engagement in a normally calibrated system falls below the threshold of a system calibrated by supernormal exposure. The organism is not damaged — its neural architecture is functioning exactly as designed, calibrating to the prevailing stimulus environment. The problem is that the prevailing environment is not the one the architecture was designed to encounter, and the calibration it produces may be maladaptive when the organism must later function in normal-range environments.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The evidence for this pattern exists in two domains that preceded AI and that Barrett studied in