Global influences on the development of spatial and object perceptual categorization abilities: Evidence from preterm infants

Abstract

Influences on the development of perceptual categorization were examined by comparing the performance of three groups of infants on spatial and object categorization tasks. The groups consisted of 1) fullterm infants tested at 3 to 4 months of age, 2) healthy preterm infants tested 3 to 4 months from birth (postnatals), and 3) healthy preterm infants tested 3 to 4 months from their due date (postterms). Four experiments showed that fullterms and postterms outperformed postnatals on a spatial categorization task (i.e., 'above' vs. 'below', and that fullterms outperformed both postnatals and postterms on object categorization tasks (i.e., dogs vs. cats, and cats vs. birds). These results suggest that maturation may be the predominant influence on the early development of the ability to form categorical representations of spatial information, while preterm birth may exert a limiting influence on the development of object categorization abilities.

Spatial representation by young infants: Categorization of spatial relations or sensitivity to a crossing primitive?

“…These results indicate that infants do not reliably respond to a change in spatial relation information when the bar is oriented at 45º, and the diamond crosses from one side to the other (e.g., below left to above right) in the transition from familiarization to the novel category preference test. The findings imply that the previous studies investigating the categorization of spatial relation information by infants were likely demonstrating that infants can represent above versus below (Mash et al, 1998;Quinn, 1994;Quinn et al, 1996) and left versus right (Experiment 1 of the present study), rather than simply responding to a crossing of one element (e.g., diamond) from one to the other side of another element (e.g., bar).…”

“…In particular, an earlier study reporting that infants could represent left and right as distinct categories left open the possibility that the infants were simply engaging in pattern discrimination (Behl-Chadha & Eimas, 1995), and prior reports that infants could represent above and below as individuated categories were also consistent with the idea that the infants were merely responding to the crossing of a target object relative to a referent bar (Mash et al, 1998;Quinn, 1994;Quinn et al, 1996;Quinn, Polly, et al, 2002).…”

“…Despite the reports that young infants can represent above versus below (Mash et al, 1998;Quinn, 1994;Quinn et al, 1996;Quinn, Polly, et al, 2002) and left versus right (Experiment 1 of the present study), there is one unresolved issue with respect to the interpretation of performance. Specifically, it is possible that infants are simply responding to the crossing of an object from one side of a bar to the other (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993;Talmy, 1983), rather than representing the spatial relations above, below, left, and right.…”

“…The procedure was one that Quinn and colleagues have employed previously to investigate whether infants can form the category representations above versus below (Mash, Quinn, Dobson, & Narter, 1998;Quinn, 1994;Quinn, Cummins, Kase, Martin, & Weissman, 1996;Quinn, Polly, Furer, Dobson, & Narter, 2002). In this procedure, 3-and 4-month-olds become familiarized with an object (i.e., a dot or diamond) located in different positions above or below a horizontal bar.…”

From the Lexicon to Expectations About Kinds: A Role for Associative Learning.

“…Gibson et al, 1979; J. J. Gibson, 1979;Huntley-Fenner et al, 2002;Mash et al, 1998;Spelke et al, 1992;Spelke & Hespos, 2001); accordingly, our connectionist model incorporates these already developed abilities (see Roy & Pentland, 2002, for a related approach). The critical claim of the model is not that lexical learning creates sensitivities to the properties of solidity and nonsolidity, or to the dimensions of shape and material, but rather that lexical learning creates a corpus of correlations between words, properties, and the dimensions that organize categories and that it is the internalization of these regularities that creates children's generalized expectations about categories of even novel solid and nonsolid things.…”