I want to remind everybody that the Reward is not the optimization target. The child is not optimizing for its reward. Thinking in terms of reward only can be misleading. A lot depends on what areas of the reward landscape are visited. It is not exactly a lock-in—because high-dimension spaces have few local maxima—but the reward landscape is big and once you are in a certain area even if you can in principle go everywhere else it may take more than a lifetime to get there. This matches the long-term effects cited. Still, parents and environment influence the exploration of the reward space and earlier movements may lock in some aspects—not only language but also concepts like ego and identity.
I want to remind everybody that the Reward is not the optimization target. The child is not optimizing for its reward. Thinking in terms of reward only can be misleading. A lot depends on what areas of the reward landscape are visited. It is not exactly a lock-in—because high-dimension spaces have few local maxima—but the reward landscape is big and once you are in a certain area even if you can in principle go everywhere else it may take more than a lifetime to get there. This matches the long-term effects cited. Still, parents and environment influence the exploration of the reward space and earlier movements may lock in some aspects—not only language but also concepts like ego and identity.