Infant perceptual and conceptual categorization: the roles of static and dynamic stimulus attributes

Infants' sensitivity to correlations between static and dynamic features in a category context

“…These results appear to contradict those of Arterberry and Bornstein (2002), who found that infants at 9 months of age could generalize from dynamic point-light displays of animals or vehicles to static images of members of those categories. Such results could be interpreted to mean that infants processed the relation between dynamic and static cues.…”

“…Many of the previous studies in this area have examined the ability to discriminate two objects that embody some kind of correlation among dynamic cues (e.g., Madole, Oakes, & Cohen, 1993;Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998), and those that examined categorization directly have used simple point-light displays in which animal and vehicle motion is depicted by local pendular versus circular movement (Arterberry & Bornstein, 2002). Sensitivity to clusters of correlations between dynamic and static cues is crucial regarding infants' developing knowledge about the motion properties of animals, people, vehicles, and furniture if correlational information is indeed the cornerstone of category coherence, as Rosch (1978) suggested.…”

“…By 3 months of age, infants prefer a moving point-light display of a human to an unstructured or random point-light display (Bertenthal, 1993), and they can categorize point-light displays of animals as diVerent from point-light displays of vehicles (Arterberry & Bornstein, 2002). The ability to attend to correlations among dynamic cues starts to improve at the beginning of the second year of life, although few, if any, studies have directly examined infants' sensitivity to clusters of dynamic correlated attributes (cf.…”

A secret agent? How infants learn about the identity of objects in a causal scene

“…Infants are sensitive to dynamic relations in studies that involve conditioning, such as when 3-month-olds learn to kick their leg to make a mobile move (Hayne, 1996), or in the presence of a facilitating cue such as, in the case of sound and object relations, temporal synchrony, intensity shift, or common rhythm (Gogate & Bahrick, 1998). There is also impressive evidence that infants are sensitive to point-light displays for animals and vehicles (Arterberry & Bornstein, 2002), although these findings can be explained by perceptual categorization of circular versus pendulum motion rather than by the ability to encode correlations among dynamic cues.…”

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

“…Not surprisingly, given their intense interest in humans and animals (e.g., LoBue et al 2013), infants rapidly begin to learn these cues and to use them in identifying novel agents (e.g., Arterberry & Bornstein 2002;Johnson et al 2001;Kamewari et al 2005;Träuble & Pauen 2011;Setoh et al 2013;Yoon & Johnson 2009). In a detour task, for example, 6.5-month-olds identified a humanoid robot as an agent even though it followed the same fixed path around the obstacle in each familiarization trial (Kamewari et al 2005).…”