Labels affect preschoolers’ tool-based scale errors

Cangelosi

Cattani

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U-shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re-examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18-30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's scale errors: A by‐product of lexical development?

Cangelosi

Cattani

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

“…The acquisition of object names has important consequences for the children's conception of objects, as it influences the way they categorize and individuate objects (e.g., Balaban & Waxman, 1997). Based on the results by Hunley and Hahn (2016), as well as Oláh et al (2016), who showed effects of object labelling on scale errors, and by Grzyb et al (2018) who showed that early talkers tend to produce more errors than late talkers, we expected DDMAN to produce more scale errors when actions were selected via the indirect semantic route (which incorporates a link between object name and action) as compared to when actions were selected via the direct visual route. However, this was not confirmed by the results from our simulation, for two possible reasons.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a tool-based scale error scenario, object naming affects children's scale errors: when the objects are not named, then scale errors decrease over the two test trials; however, when the objects are named, scale errors remain high in the second test trial (Hunley & Hahn, 2016). In a tool-based scale error scenario, object naming affects children's scale errors: when the objects are not named, then scale errors decrease over the two test trials; however, when the objects are named, scale errors remain high in the second test trial (Hunley & Hahn, 2016).…”

Section: Research Highlightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, we will examine whether object naming increases the number of scale errors produced by DDMAN. In a tool-based scale error scenario, object naming affects children's scale errors: when the objects are not named, then scale errors decrease over the two test trials; however, when the objects are named, scale errors remain high in the second test trial (Hunley & Hahn, 2016). In addition, Oláh, Elekes, Pető, Peres, and Király (2016) showed that children were more likely to make scale errors when tools were named by a nonword by a native speaker as opposed to a foreign speaker, suggesting that meaningful linguistic context is needed for this facilitation to occur.…”

Section: Research Highlightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions: A computational model

Nagai

Asada

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size-they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional bias. We used computational modelling to emulate children's learning to associate objects with actions and to select appropriate actions, given object shape and size. A computational Developmental Deep Model of Action and Naming (DDMAN) was built on the dual-route theory of action selection, in which actions on objects are selected via a direct (nonsemantic or visual) route or an indirect (semantic) route. As in case of children, DDMAN produced scale errors: the number of errors was high at the beginning of training and decreased linearly but did not disappear completely. Inspection of emerging object-action associations revealed that these were coarsely organized by shape, hence leading DDMAN to initially select actions based on shape rather than size. With experience, DDMAN gradually learned to use size in addition to shape when selecting actions. Overall, our simulations demonstrate that children's scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions. K E Y W O R D Saction selection, computational model, perception-action coupling, scale errors

Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers

Infant Behavior and Development

Cangelosi

Cattani

et al. 2017

Young children sometimes make serious attempts to perform impossible actions on miniature objects as if they were full-size objects. The existing explanations of these curious action errors assume (but never explicitly tested) children's decreased attention to object size information. This study investigated the attention to object size information in scale errors performers. Two groups of children aged 18-25 months (N=52) and 48-60 months (N=23) were tested in two consecutive tasks: an action task that replicated the original scale errors elicitation situation, and a looking task that involved watching on a computer screen actions performed with adequate to inadequate size object. Our key finding - that children performing scale errors in the action task subsequently pay less attention to size changes than non-scale errors performers in the looking task - suggests that the origins of scale errors in childhood operate already at the perceptual level, and not at the action level.