Lumping and splitting: Developmental changes in the structure of children’s semantic networks

Vales, Catarina; Stevens, Patience; Fisher, Anna V.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104914

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Together, these results suggest parallel developmental changes in both visual production and recognition of drawings across childhood. Children may undergo a more protracted developmental trajectory for the development of visual concepts than previously DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION thought, in tandem with refinements in their perceptual abilities (Bova et al, 2007;Natu et al, 2016) and their semantic knowledge about object categories (Tversky, 1985;Vales, Stevens, & Fisher, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…in early childhood, the fastest cheetah -that is, the exemplar with the most extreme value on some property -tends to be seen as the best and the most representative cheetah (Foster-Hanson & Rhodes, 2019). At the same time, taxonomic groupings become increasingly important both in children's explicit conceptual judgements (Tversky, 1985) and when children spontaneously arrange different visual concepts (e.g., wild vs. farm animals, Vales et al, 2020). Thus, children's evolving semantic knowledge could shape the visual features children use both when producing and recognizing different visual concepts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Long¹,

Fan²,

R³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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To what extent do visual concepts of dogs, cars, and clocks change across childhood? We hypothesized that as children progressively learn which features best distinguish visual concepts from one another, they also improve their ability to connect this knowledge with external representations. To examine this possibility, we investigated developmental changes in children's ability to produce and recognize drawings of common object categories. First, we recruited children aged 2-10 years to produce drawings of 48 categories via a free-standing kiosk in a children's museum, and we measured how recognizable these >37K drawings were using a deep convolutional neural network model of object recognition. Second, we recruited other children across the same age range to identify the drawn category in a subset of these drawings via "guessing games" at the same kiosk.We found consistent developmental gains in both children's ability to include diagnostic visual features in their drawings and in children's ability to use these features when recognizing other children's drawings. Our results suggest that children's ability to connect internal and external representations of visual concepts improves gradually across childhood and imply that developmental trajectories of visual concept learning may be more protracted than previously thought.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Long¹,

Fan²,

R³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is a crucial difference relative to prior work (Fisher et al, 2015), and in requiring children to simultaneously attend to both distinctions might have reduced the odds that children noticed within domain distinctions. Prior work using this task suggests that these are important methodological considerations (Vales et al, 2020b), and we believe future work intending to use remote assessments of semantic structure and semantic inferences should consider the goals of the assessments when deciding whether to examine within-and across-domain differentiation in the same or separate trials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This, however, results in a considerable difference relative to the procedure employed by Fisher et al (2015), who tested triads of items in each trial -thus providing children with a much smaller number of items at a time and thus more degrees of freedom to arrange them. In the case of the spatial arrangement task as designed for this study, the need to attend to both withinand across-domain differentiation, as well as the larger number of cards presented at once, likely reduced the likelihood of detecting individual differences in within-domain differentiation [see Experiment 2 in Vales et al (2020b) for converging evidence]. Taken together, these results suggest that future work examining semantic structure -and in particular, individual differences in within-domain differentiation in young children -may want to consider whether to assess within-domain differentiation in separate trials and how many items to present in each trial.…”

Section: Relation Between Degree Of Within-domain Differentiation and Inferences In The Presence Of Close Luresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research at a Distance: Replicating Semantic Differentiation Effects Using Remote Data Collection With Children Participants

Vales

Torrance

et al. 2021

Front. Psychol.

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Remote data collection procedures can strengthen developmental science by addressing current limitations to in-person data collection and helping recruit more diverse and larger samples of participants. Thus, remote data collection opens an opportunity for more equitable and more replicable developmental science. However, it remains an open question whether remote data collection procedures with children participants produce results comparable to those obtained using in-person data collection. This knowledge is critical to integrate results across studies using different data collection procedures. We developed novel web-based versions of two tasks that have been used in prior work with 4-6-year-old children and recruited children who were participating in a virtual enrichment program. We report the first successful remote replication of two key experimental effects that speak to the emergence of structured semantic representations (N = 52) and their role in inferential reasoning (N = 40). We discuss the implications of these findings for using remote data collection with children participants, for maintaining research collaborations with community settings, and for strengthening methodological practices in developmental science.

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“…Over the course of development, semantic organization both expands to incorporate new concepts and new relations between concepts (Bjorklund & Jacobs, 1985;Blaye, Bernard-Peyron, Paour, & Bonthoux, 2006;Coley, 2012;Crowe & Prescott, 2003;Howard & Howard, 1977;Nguyen, 2007;Storm, 1980;Tversky, 1985;Unger, Fisher, Nugent, Ventura, & MacLellan, 2016;Vales, Stevens, & Fisher, 2020;Walsh, Richardson, & Faulkner, 1993). The trajectory of semantic organization development has been extensively studied in prior developmental research.…”

Section: Accounting For the Trajectory Of Semantic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of richly organized semantic knowledge from simple statistics: A synthetic review

Unger

Fisher

2021

Developmental Review

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As adults, we draw upon our ample knowledge about the world to support such vital cognitive feats as using language, reasoning, retrieving knowledge relevant to our current goals, planning for the future, adapting to unexpected events, and navigating through the environment. Our knowledge readily supports these feats because it is not merely a collection of stored facts, but rather functions as an organized, semantic network of concepts connected by meaningful relations. How do the relations that fundamentally organize semantic concepts emerge with development? Here, we cast a spotlight on a potentially powerful but often overlooked driver of semantic organization: Rich statistical regularities that are ubiquitous in both language and visual input. In this synthetic review, we show that a driving role for statistical regularities is convergently supported by evidence from diverse fields, including computational modeling, statistical learning, and semantic development. Finally, we identify a number of key avenues of future research into how statistical regularities may drive the development of semantic organization.

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Lumping and splitting: Developmental changes in the structure of children’s semantic networks

Cited by 8 publications

References 54 publications

Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Research at a Distance: Replicating Semantic Differentiation Effects Using Remote Data Collection With Children Participants

The emergence of richly organized semantic knowledge from simple statistics: A synthetic review

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