Abstract Rule Learning for Visual Sequences in 8‐ and 11‐Month‐Olds

Abstract

The experiments reported here investigated the development of a fundamental component of cognition: to recognize and generalize abstract relations. Infants were presented with simple rulegoverned patterned sequences of visual shapes (ABB, AAB, and ABA) that could be discriminated from differences in the position of the repeated element (late, early, or nonadjacent, respectively). Eight-month-olds were found to distinguish patterns on the basis of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to its position in the sequence; 11-month-olds distinguished patterns over the position of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to the nonadjacent repetition. These results suggest that abstract pattern detection may develop incrementally in a process of constructing complex relations from more primitive components.Detection and generalization of patterns is a fundamental, core component of cognition, central to object and face recognition (Biederman, 1987;Hummel & Biederman, 1992), categorization (Kruschke, 1992), inference (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), reasoning (Murphy, 2002), word segmentation (Swingley, 2005), language acquisition (Brown, 1973;Pinker, 1994), and other developmental achievements. A central question often posed by developmental researchers, therefore, concerns the ability of infants and children to learn patterns and structure. The environment contains an immeasurable variety of objects and events, and an infinite number of relations between them, most of which are not useful for the developing child. It is essential, then, to understand the types of patterns that children are and are not able to learn.Correspondence should be addressed to Scott P. Johnson, UCLA Psychology-Developmental, Box 951563, 1285 Franz Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563. E-mail: scott.johnson@ucla.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptInfancy. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 March 11. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptOne common approach in investigations of early pattern perception is to examine infants' sensitivity to structured relations among stimulus features in visual or auditory input. Experiments on statistical learning, for example, have explored the extent to which infants detect and use distributional information in auditory or visual sequences to combine individual features into larger units. Typically in these experiments, infants are presented with a stream of input consisting of repeating multielement units with randomized order, but fixed internal structure. Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) used this approach to investigate 8-month-old infants' word segmentation in a corpus of artificial speech. Noting that adjacent sounds in natural speech that are likely to cooccur are usually found within words, whereas low-probability sound pairs tend to span word boundaries, Saffran et al. asked whether this difference in probability of cooccurrence provides potential information for word boundaries. Infants' discrimination of high-and low-probability sound pairs was e...

Infants’ representations of same and different in match- and non-match-to-sample

“…We first look for evidence that infants use abstract representations in MTS and NMTS tasks, and then ask what those representations might be. While we focus on MTS and NMTS, in the general discussion we also consider the representations that might underlie infants’ success on other tasks that probe repesentations of sameness and difference, including habituation to pairs of objects that are the same or to pairs of different objects (Addyman & Mareschal, 2010; Ferry et al, 2015; Tyrell et al, 1991), habituation to patterns specified by pairs of identical elements; e.g., ABA or ABB (Dawson & Gerken, 2009; Johnson et al, 2009; Marcus et al, 1999; Rabagliati et al, 2012; Saffran et al, 2007), and conditioned responses on pairs of identical elements (Hochmann, 2010; Hochmann et al, 2011; Kovács, 2014; Tyrell et al, 1993; Walker & Gopnik, 2014). …”

Overcoming Memory Limitations in Rule Learning

“…An important method in characterizing the mechanisms of rule learning has been comparison of the difficulty that participants (usually adult learners but sometimes infants) have in acquiring rules of different kinds (Endress, DehaeneLambertz, & Mehler, 2007;Endress & Bonatti, 2007;Endress, Scholl, & Mehler, 2005;Frank, Slemmer, Marcus, & Johnson, 2009;Gómez, 2002;Johnson et al, 2009;Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007; K. Smith, 1966). The strategy in these investigations is to assess the ability of participants to learn particular regularities; these regularities often vary along some dimension such as variability (Gómez, 2002) or position (Endress et al, 2005).…”

Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers

“…Human infants are able to generalize these relations in looking-time experiments. In particular, pre-verbal infants can be habituated to pairs of same and different objects (Addyman & Mareschal, 2010;Ferry, Hespos, & Gentner, 2015;Hochmann, Mody, & Carey, 2016;Tyrell, Stauffer, & Snowman, 1991), discriminate and generalize patterns of repeated visual or auditory elements (ABA/AAB/ABB) (Dawson & Gerken, 2009;Johnson et al, 2009;Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, & Vishton, 1999;Saffran, Pollak, Seibel, & Shkolnik, 2007), and provide a conditioned response to pairs of identical stimuli (Hochmann, 2010;Kovács, 2014). Moreover, very young toddlers can apparently use same-different relations in an active causal learning paradigm (Walker & Gopnik, 2014), although this ability declines in the preschool period (Walker, Bridgers, & Gopnik, 2016).…”