Learning Visual Units After Brief Experience in 10‐Month‐Old Infants

Abstract

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10-month-old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three-dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three-dimensional world through their experiences in it.

Infant fMRI: A Model System for Cognitive Neuroscience

“…Although infants begin with some tuning, such as for face-like stimuli [52, 53], experience adapts this tuning to the statistics of environmental input [7, 54]. Even by 4 months of age infants exhibit greater discrimination of faces from their own ethnicity relative to faces from ethnicities that they do not see regularly [55], a learning process often referred to as perceptual narrowing [6, 56]. Importantly, these changes in infants are more drastic than in adults, in terms of the scope of stimuli impacted, persistently generalizing to and affecting entire classes of frequently occurring objects.…”

Developmental changes between childhood and adulthood in passive observational and interactive feedback‐based categorization rule learning

“…A key cognitive process underlying this capacity is Category Learning (CL), which enables the child to categorize objects or events in a meaningful way by inferring which attributes are important and which are not (Hanania & Smith, 2010;McColeman & Blair, 2013;Sloutsky, 2010). Being a fundamental cognitive skill, CL starts developing very early (Best, Yim & Sloutsky, 2013;Graham & Diesendruck, 2010;Feldman, Myers, White, Griffiths & Morgan, 2013;Needham, Goldstone & Wiesen, 2014). Early in development, CL often relies on active exploration that involves trial-and-error or feedback-based learning.…”