Object Function Facilitates Infants' Object Individuation in a Manual Search Task

The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action understanding and prediction

“…Action information is such a central aspect of human object knowledge that it directly affects object identification and categorization. Already in 12 month old infants, object function contributes to object individuation and categorization (e.g., Booth and Waxman, 2002 ; Kingo and Krøjgaard, 2012 ). In adults, several studies have shown that an object is identified more easily when preceded by an object with either a similar or complementary function (e.g., corkscrew, wine bottle) (e.g., Riddoch et al, 2003 ; Bach et al, 2005 ; McNair and Harris, 2013 ), or one that requires similar forms of manipulation (e.g., both a piano and a keyboard require typing, Helbig et al, 2006 ; McNair and Harris, 2012 ).…”

The differentiation of early word meanings from global to specific categories: Towards a verification of the “semantic pluripotency hypothesis”

“…Despite conflicting evidence on the central role of object-specific actions over perceptual cues in object word and object-category learning (Capone & McGregor, 2005;Kingo & Krøjgaard, 2012;Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1998;Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1996), young children are likely able to leverage such actions in word learning and object categorization, at least in some situations (e.g., actions are particularly emphasized). Children's learning strategies may also be susceptible to differences in the relative saliency between static shape and dynamic action cues (Hammer & Diesendruck, 2005).…”

Eight-year-olds, but not six-year-olds, perform just as well as adults when playing Concentration: Resolving the enigma?

“…Perhaps the most straightforward way to explain the stable order in which game efficiency differs across icon sets would be by considering how different (or similar) the different pairs were from a visual feature perspective. In the infant literature, the typical way to assess visual feature differences between objects is to consider the dimensions shape, size, color, and texture/material (e.g., Kingo & Krøjgaard, 2011;Krøjgaard, 2004;Wilcox, 1999).…”