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Erin M. Anderson; Apoorva Shivaram; Susan J. Hespos; Dedre Gentner – Grantee Submission, 2023
The ability to generalize previous knowledge to new contexts is a key aspect of human cognition and relational learning. A well-known learning maxim is that breadth of training predicts "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." When examples vary in their surface features, this provides evidence that only the common relational…
Descriptors: Learning Processes, Generalization, Transfer of Training, Familiarity
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Ori Ossmy; Danyang Han; Patrick MacAlpine; Justine Hoch; Peter Stone; Karen E. Adolph – Developmental Science, 2024
What is the optimal penalty for errors in infant skill learning? Behavioral analyses indicate that errors are frequent but trivial as infants acquire foundational skills. In learning to walk, for example, falling is commonplace but appears to incur only a negligible penalty. Behavioral data, however, cannot reveal whether a low penalty for falling…
Descriptors: Physical Activities, Robotics, Error Patterns, Infants
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Bakopoulou, Milena; Lorenz, Megan G.; Forbes, Samuel H.; Tremlin, Rachel; Bates, Jessica; Samuelson, Larissa K. – Developmental Science, 2023
Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Attention, Eye Movements, Nouns
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Ciobha A. McKeown; Carley E. Smith; Timothy R. Vollmer; Lindsay A. Lloveras; Kerri P. Peters – Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 2024
Teaching an infant manual signs is beneficial as it promotes early communication, improves socialization, and can functionally replace behaviors such as crying and whining. Improving early communication also may reduce the probability of an infant engaging in dangerous behavior, like unsafe climbing. The purpose of this study was to extend…
Descriptors: Teaching Methods, Infants, Help Seeking, Nonverbal Communication
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Jeancolas, Laetitia; Rat-Fischer, Lauriane; O'Regan, J. Kevin; Fagard, Jacqueline – Journal of Motor Learning and Development, 2022
Infants start to use a spoon for self-feeding at the end of the first year of life, but usually do not use unfamiliar tools to solve problems before the age of 2 years. We investigated to what extent 18-month-old infants who are familiar with using a spoon for self-feeding are able to generalize this tool-use ability to retrieve a distant object.…
Descriptors: Infants, Problem Solving, Equipment, Generalization
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Werchan, Denise M.; Amso, Dima – Developmental Science, 2021
Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially…
Descriptors: Infants, Reinforcement, Bias, Stimuli
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Singh, Leher; Rajendra, Sarah J.; Mazuka, Reiko – Child Development Perspectives, 2022
Over the past 50 years, scientists have made amazing discoveries about the origins of human language acquisition. Central to this field of study is the process by which infants' perceptual sensitivities gradually align with native language structure, known as "perceptual narrowing." Perceptual narrowing offers a theoretical account of…
Descriptors: Infants, Cognitive Development, Child Development, Language Acquisition
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Sensoy, Özlem; Culham, Jody C.; Schwarzer, Gudrun – Infant and Child Development, 2021
We investigate when infants exhibit knowledge of the familiar size of well-known objects and whether this knowledge is affected by stimulus format, that is, whether the stimuli are presented as real objects or matched pictures. Infants (130 7- and 12-month-olds) saw everyday objects such as sippy cups and pacifiers in their familiar size and novel…
Descriptors: Infants, Visual Stimuli, Pictorial Stimuli, Familiarity