Human children aften use meta-rules to learn. Here is an example:

Words like bottle, chair and dog are often preceeded by the article "the". It is then easy to think that "the" refers to a category of objects, which are nouns in the syntax.

"Look at the butterfly" induces a search amongst the objects in the vicinity rather than treating "butterfly" as a verb or an adjective. The child relies on syntactic bootstrapping.

A very powerful meta-rule is the Principle of Causality: some of the sensory experiences received are causes and others are consequences.

Entertaining high-level hypothesis (like causality) is a blessing of abstraction. This massively accelerates learning, beacuse it dramatically narrows the set of plaussible hypotheses (models) within which to search.