Naming influences 9-month-olds’ identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum

Havy, Mélanie; Waxman, Sandra R.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.011

Cited by 34 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…A recent surge of research –outside of infants’ visual and social preferences—provides evidence infants have the cognitive capacities that may underlie conceptually rich social categorization. Infants can think about individual items as members of conceptual categories [68], form inductive inferences [69–70], and track complex social relationships [71–79]. Below we review evidence suggesting conceptually rich social categorization emerges early in life.…”

Section: The Origins Of Social Preferences and Social Categorization mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Origins of Social Categorization

Liberman

Woodward

Kinzler

2017

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

217

156

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Forming conceptually rich social categories helps people navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about others’ likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interactions as guided by group membership. Yet, social categorization often has nefarious consequences. We suggest that the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy: social categories guide infants’ inferences about peoples’ shared characteristics and social relationships. We also suggest that the ability to form abstract social categories may be separable from the eventual negative downstream consequences of social categorization, including prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping. Whereas a tendency to form inductively rich social categories appears early in ontogeny, prejudice based on each particular category dimension may not be inevitable.

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Section: The Origins Of Social Preferences and Social Categorization mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Origins of Social Categorization

Liberman

Woodward

Kinzler

2017

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

217

156

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When presented with a set of objects that vary along a continuous distribution, infants use labels to infer the underlying categories. If all the objects are named with the same novel word, infants form a single inclusive object category; in contrast, if the objects on opposite sides of the continuum receive different names, infants form two contrastive categories (Althaus & Westermann, ; Havy & Waxman, ; Plunkett, Hu, & Cohen, ). This link between naming and object categories, which develops within infants' first year, may play an important role in early category acquisition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A little labeling goes a long way: Semi‐supervised learning in infancy

LaTourrette

Waxman

2018

Developmental Science

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There is considerable evidence that labeling supports infants' object categorization. Yet in daily life, most of the category exemplars that infants encounter will remain unlabeled. Inspired by recent evidence from machine learning, we propose that infants successfully exploit this sparsely labeled input through "semi-supervised learning." Providing only a few labeled exemplars leads infants to initiate the process of categorization, after which they can integrate all subsequent exemplars, labeled or unlabeled, into their evolving category representations. Using a classic novelty preference task, we introduced 2-year-old infants (n = 96) to a novel object category, varying whether and when its exemplars were labeled. Infants were equally successful whether all exemplars were labeled (fully supervised condition) or only the first two exemplars were labeled (semi-supervised condition), but they failed when no exemplars were labeled (unsupervised condition). Furthermore, the timing of the labeling mattered: when the labeled exemplars were provided at the end, rather than the beginning, of familiarization (reversed semi-supervised condition), infants failed to learn the category. This provides the first evidence of semi-supervised learning in infancy, revealing that infants excel at learning from exactly the kind of input that they typically receive in acquiring real-world categories and their names.

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“…Concerning the visual dimension, simulating meaningful variability has been a notoriously di cult problem. Following previous studies (Freedman et al, 2001;Havy & Waxman, 2016;Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004), we used a visual continuum along a one-dimensional morph. This simplification was motivated by the need to construct a multimodal input where the auditory and visual components are parametrized in a symmetrical fashion, allowing us to compare graded e ects of auditory and visual information on categorical judgment.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Optimal is Word-Referent Identification Under Multimodal Uncertainty?

Fourtassi¹,

Frank²

2018

Preprint

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Identifying a spoken word in a referential context requires both the ability to integrate multimodal input and the ability to reason under uncertainty. How do these tasks interact with one another? We study how adults identify novel words under joint uncertainty in the auditory and visual modalities and we propose an ideal observer model of how cues in these modalities are combined optimally. Model predictions are tested in four experiments where recognition is made under various sources of uncertainty. We found that participants use both auditory and visual cues to recognize novel words. When the signal is not distorted with environmental noise, participants weight the auditory and visual cues optimally, that is, according to the relative reliability of each modality. In contrast, when one modality has noise added to it, human perceivers systematically prefer the unperturbed modality to a greater extent than the optimal model does. This work extends the literature on perceptual cue combination to the case of word recognition in a referential context. In addition, this context offers a link to the study of multimodal information in word meaning learning.

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Naming influences 9-month-olds’ identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum

Cited by 34 publications

References 83 publications

The Origins of Social Categorization

The Origins of Social Categorization

A little labeling goes a long way: Semi‐supervised learning in infancy

How Optimal is Word-Referent Identification Under Multimodal Uncertainty?

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