Early development of perceptual expertise: Within-basic-level categorization experience facilitates the formation of subordinate-level category representations in 6- to 7-month-old infants

Quinn, Paul C.; Tanaka, James W.

doi:10.3758/bf03193612

Cited by 23 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Quinn & Tanaka (2007) found that expertise within the same basic level category aided infants in the ability to discriminate other concrete level categories, emphasizing the role of expertise in category discrimination. Coley (2007) showed that children of eight years or older were more likely to categorize humans as being similar to primates and primates as being more similar to mammals than non-mammals, but younger children were not sensitive to these taxonomic groupings, further supporting the notion that intermediate level biological categories are learned rather than perceived.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Matching based on biological categories in Orangutans (Pongo abelii) and a Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla)

Vonk

2013

PeerJ

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Following a series of experiments in which six orangutans and one gorilla discriminated photographs of different animal species in a two-choice touch screen procedure, Vonk & MacDonald (2002) and Vonk & MacDonald (2004) concluded that orangutans, but not the gorilla, seemed to learn intermediate level category discriminations, such as primates versus non-primates, more rapidly than they learned concrete level discriminations, such as orangutans versus humans. In the current experiments, four of the same orangutans and the gorilla were presented with delayed matching-to-sample tasks in which they were rewarded for matching photos of different members of the same primate species; golden lion tamarins, Japanese macaques, and proboscis monkeys, or family; gibbons, lemurs (Experiment 1), and subsequently for matching photos of different species within the following classes: birds, reptiles, insects, mammals, and fish (Experiment 2). Members of both Great Ape species were rapidly able to match the photos at levels above chance. Orangutans matched images from both category levels spontaneously whereas the gorilla showed effects of learning to match intermediate level categories. The results show that biological knowledge is not necessary to form natural categories at both concrete and intermediate levels.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Matching based on biological categories in Orangutans (Pongo abelii) and a Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla)

Vonk

2013

PeerJ

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“…These early categorization abilities have led researchers to hypothesize that the development of face and object representations in infancy might be akin to the acquisition of perceptual expertise in adults (Scott & Monesson, 2009Quinn & Tanaka, 2007). The present investigation goes beyond the existence of representations and determining whether infants can categorize and shows the emergence of experience-specific representations with training.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Much of the early developmental literature focuses on determining whether infants can represent objects as solid and connected items that behave in predicable ways (e.g., Baillargeon, 1993;Spelke & Van de Walle, 1993;Wynn, 1992). Beyond knowing that infants can represent objects, we also know that by 6-7 months of age infants categorize visual objects at the global, basic, and subordinate levels (Quinn & Tanaka, 2007;Mareschal & Quinn, 2001). Finally, infants as young as 3 months of age have been found to link spoken words with object categories (Ferry, Hespos, & Waxman, 2010) and by the end of the first year of life infants use linguistic labels to guide object individuation (Xu, Cote, & Baker, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Mechanisms Underlying the Emergence of Object Representations during Infancy

Scott

2011

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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The effects of individual versus category training, using behavioral indices of stimulus discrimination and neural ERPs indices of holistic processing, were examined in infants. Following pretraining assessments at 6 months, infants were sent home with training books of objects for 3 months. One group of infants was trained with six different strollers labeled individually, and another group was trained with the same six strollers labeled at the category level (i.e., "stroller"). Infants returned for posttraining assessments at 9 months. Discrimination of objects was facilitated for infants trained with the individually labeled strollers but was unchanged after training at the category level. Relative to pretraining and to category-level training, individual-level training resulted in increased holistic processing of strollers recorded over occipital brain regions. These results suggest that labeling nonface objects individually, in infancy, facilitates discrimination and leads to the emergence of holistic neural representations not present with category-level labeling.

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“…Here too, studies across a wide range of topics suggest that too many competing items can disrupt learning (e.g., in wordlearning [Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010]; science learning in museum settings [Allen & Gutwill, 2004], target identification in rapid presentations [Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997], working memory [Carroll et al, 2010], and long-term memory [Axmacher, Haupt, Cohen, Elgar, & Fell, 2009]). On the other hand, the presence of multiple exemplars has also been shown to aid infants and children in forming categories (Graham, Namy, Gentner, & Meagher, 2010;Quinn & Tanaka, 2007;Waxman, Chambers, Yntema, & Gelman, 1989), remembering hidden objects (Oakes, Kovack-Lesh, & Horst, 2009), and in learning "deeper" relational information (Gentner & Namy, 1999). Thus, the role of competing options in helping or hindering learning remains an open question.…”

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confidence: 97%