Infants’ use of category knowledge and object attributes when segregating objects at 8.5 months of age

Needham, Amy; Cantlon, Jessica F.; Holley, Susan M. Ormsbee

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.05.003

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We think it unlikely that labels are required for the formation of object categories, however, since even young infants form and use object categories (e.g., Eimas & Quinn, 1994; Needham, Cantlon, & Ormsbee Holley, 2006; Needham, Dueker, & Lockhead, 2005; Quinn, Eimas, & Rosenkrantz, 1993). Instead, as discussed later, our claims are that (1) although young infants who encounter an artifact in a nonfunctional context typically do not encode its object category, they can readily be primed to do so do by various non-linguistic manipulations, and (2) toward the end of the first year, perhaps as a result of language acquisition, infants begin to spontaneously encode artifacts taxonomically, even in non-functional contexts and without priming manipulations.…”

Section: Object Individuation In Infantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

Baillargeon

Stavans

et al. 2012

Language Learning and Development

142

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Much of the research on object individuation in infancy has used a task in which two different objects emerge in alternation from behind a large screen, which is then removed to reveal either one or two objects. In their seminal work, Xu and Carey (1996) found that it is typically not until the end of the first year that infants detect a violation when a single object is revealed. Since then, a large number of investigations have modified the standard task in various ways and found that young infants succeed with some but not with other modifications, yielding a complex and unwieldy picture. In this article, we argue that this confusing picture can be better understood by bringing to bear insights from a related subfield of infancy research, physical reasoning. By considering how infants reason about object information within and across physical events, we can make sense of apparently inconsistent findings from different object-individuation tasks. In turn, object-individuation findings deepen our understanding of how physical reasoning develops in infancy. Integrating the insights from physical-reasoning and object-individuation investigations thus enriches both subfields and brings about a clearer account of how infants represent objects and events.

show abstract

Section: Object Individuation In Infantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

Baillargeon

Stavans

et al. 2012

Language Learning and Development

142

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Each object representation is bound to its index [16] so that infants can keep track of the properties of each object. A variety of segregation, recognition and categorization processes can operate on the representations, to include additional information or to highlight particular information [23][24][25][26][27]. For example, infants might use information from previous encounters with the cover (or similar covers) to determine that it is a cover rather than a block.…”

Section: A Three-system Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting impossible changes in infancy: a three-system account

Wang¹,

Baillargeon²

2008

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can infants detect that an object has magically disappeared, broken apart or changed color while briefly hidden? Recent research suggests that infants detect some but not other 'impossible' changes; and that various contextual manipulations can induce infants to detect changes they would not otherwise detect. We present an account that includes three systems: a physicalreasoning, an object-tracking, and an object-representation system. What impossible changes infants detect depends on what object information is included in the physical-reasoning system; this information becomes subject to a principle of persistence, which states that objects can undergo no spontaneous or uncaused change. What contextual manipulations induce infants to detect impossible changes depends on complex interplays between the physical-reasoning system and the object-tracking and object-representation systems. Change violations and cognitive developmentThe study of change blindness -the inability to notice changes when they occur during a brief visual disruption -has a long history in the field of infant cognition, and encompasses two broad lines of research. In one, infants are presented with a series of static arrays, and investigators examine whether infants detect salient changes between arrays [1][2][3]. In the other, infants are presented with physical events in which objects become briefly hidden, and researchers ask whether infants notice 'impossible' changes, or change violations, that occur while the objects are out of sight [4][5][6]. In this review, we focus on this second line of research.Investigations of infants' ability to detect change violations have addressed several related questions. First, what change violations can infants detect when shown a single event involving few objects? For example, can infants detect that an object has magically disappeared, broken apart or changed color [7,8]? Second, can infants who fail to detect a change violation be induced to do so through contextual manipulations [9,10]? Third, how does infants' performance deteriorate under more challenging conditions: for example, when the event unfolds rapidly, when the number of objects in the event is increased or when multiple events are shown simultaneously [11,12]? The answers to these questions have proven remarkably intricate, and are helping to shed light on the various cognitive systems that underlie infants' responses of to events.In this review, we focus on the first two questions (see Box 1 for an overview of the third has helped us formulate an account of the physical-reasoning system of infants [13][14][15].Research on the second question -can infants be induced through contextual manipulations to detect change violations they do not spontaneously detect? -is leading us to explore possible links between the physical-reasoning system and two other systems suggested by findings in the adult and infant visual cognition literature: the object-tracking system [16][17][18], and another system we term the object-representation syst...

show abstract

“…Thus, experience and experience‐dependent preferences seem to play a role in categorization performance (Needham et al., 2006, discuss related findings), and preexisting representations may help to explain categorization in young infants. More generally, these findings suggest that infants’ experiences outside the laboratory can affect their categorical responding in the laboratory (Bar‐Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Kelly et al., 2005, 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience‐Based and On‐Line Categorization of Objects in Early Infancy

Bornstein

Mash

2010

Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What processes do infants employ in categorizing? Infants might categorize on line as they encounter category-related entities; alternatively, infants might depend on prior experience with entities in formulating categories. These alternatives were tested in forty-four 5-month-olds. Infants who were familiarized in the laboratory with a category of never-before-seen objects subsequently treated novel objects of the same category as familiar --they categorized on line --just as did infants who were exposed to objects from the same category at home for 2 months leading to their laboratory assessment of object categorization. Infants with home experience also recognized novel category objects as familiar from the outset -that is, prior experience with category exemplars was brought to bear in laboratory tasks.

show abstract

Infants’ use of category knowledge and object attributes when segregating objects at 8.5 months of age

Cited by 17 publications

References 38 publications

Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

Detecting impossible changes in infancy: a three-system account

Experience‐Based and On‐Line Categorization of Objects in Early Infancy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About