Abstraction of prototypical information by adults and 10-month-old infants.

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate whether preverbal infants, when presented with exemplars of an artificially constructed category, would abstract a prototypical representation of the category, and if so, whether this representation was formed by either "counting" or "averaging" the features that were varying among category members. Two experiments are reported. In Experiment 1, a set of stimuli was developed and tested for which it was demonstrated that adult subjects would readily abstract either a modal or an average prototypical representation. The type of representation abstracted was found to be dependent on the discriminability of the feature values. In Experiment 2, lO-mo.-old infants were tested using a habituation paradigm with the stimuli developed in the first experiment. The results of this study indicated that the infants were also able to abstract the featural information that was varying among the exemplars of the category, and the infants formed an internal representation of the category by averaging feature values. Thus, the results clearly imply that infants are able to constructively process visual information and hence take a. more active role in category formation than had been previously believed.Children at a young age are aware of many conceptual categories that exist in the world. For example, even a preverbal 11-or 12-mo.-old infant responds in a behaviorally appropriate manner to categories such as food, toys, and people. But how does the young child initially learn This article is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the PhD degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Infants attend to second-order relational properties of faces

“…It has been known for some time that infants are capable of abstracting prototypical information from schematic faces (Strauss, 1979). The ability that infants show in applying an averaging tool to more realistic face stimuli is per-haps not unexpected.…”

Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition

“…Instead, new items are categorized by direct comparison with the abstract prototype. Some evidence for this view comes from experiments in which adults and infants appear to find 'prototypical' items, which they have never seen, as familiar as -or occasionally even more familiar than -actual training items, especially after a delay of a week (e.g., Strauss 1979;Homa, Sterling and Trepel 1981). An alternative body of opinion views categorization as instance learning (see Chandler 2002, for a review).…”

Visual signalling by asymmetry: a review of perceptual processes

“…It is thought that humans form a mental prototype that is an average (or summation) of previous signals against which they compare a novel signal. Several studies have indicated that these prototypical representations are preferred over more extreme signals (Strauss 1979;Bomba & Siqueland 1983;Younger 1985;Quinn & Eimas 1986;Younger & Gotlieb 1988;Langlois & Roggman 1990). As prototypes for traits that show £uctuating asymmetry will be symmetrical, it could be predicted that symmetrical (average) signals should be preferred.…”