How does variability between members of a category influence infants' category learning? We explore the impact of the order in which different items are sampled on category formation. Two groups of 10-months-olds were presented with a series of exemplars to be organized into a single category. In a low distance group, the order of presentation…

Why is a face with a smile but non-happy eyes likely to be interpreted as happy? We used blended expressions in which a smiling mouth was incongruent with the eyes (e.g., angry eyes), as well as genuine expressions with congruent eyes and mouth (e.g., both happy or angry). Tasks involved detection of a smiling mouth (perceptual), categorization of…

Human infants grow up in environments populated by artifacts. In order to acquire knowledge about different kinds of human-made objects, children have to be able to focus on the information that is most relevant for sorting artifacts into categories. Traditional theories emphasize the role of superficial, perceptual features in object…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

It is well established that faces, in contrast to objects, are categorized as fast or faster at the individual level (e.g., Bill Clinton) than at the basic-level (e.g., human face). This subordinate-shift from basic-level categorization has been considered an outcome of visual expertise with processing faces. However, in the present study we found…

We asked whether infants are sensitive to causal relations between objects and outcomes and whether this sensitivity supports categorization. Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants were familiarized with objects from a novel category. For some, the objects caused an electronic toy to activate. For others, the objects were present during activation of…

Although infants begin to encode and track novel words in fluent speech by 7.5 months, their ability to recognize words is somewhat limited at this stage. In particular, when the surface form of a word is altered, by changing the gender or affective prosody of the speaker, infants begin to falter at spoken word recognition. Given that natural…

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception:…

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1…

We explore in this study how infants may derive phonetic categories from adult input that are highly variable. Neural networks in the form of self-organizing maps (SOMs; Kohonen, 1989, 1995) were used to simulate unsupervised learning of Mandarin tones. In Simulation 1, we trained the SOMs with syllable-sized continuous F[subscript 0] contours,…

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-olds could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. Found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct…

This study examined whether 9.5-month-olds could use featural information to individuate objects. Results suggest that infants categorize events involving opaque and transparent occluders as the same kind of situation and that infants are more likely to give evidence of individuation when they need to reason about one kind of event than when they…

Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object…

An extensive body of research claims that labels facilitate categorisation, highlight the commonalities between objects and act as invitations to form categories for young infants before their first birthday. While this may indeed be a reasonable claim, we argue that it is not justified by the experiments described in the research. We report on a…

While five-month-old infants show orientation-specific sensitivity to changes in the motion and occlusion patterns of human point-light displays, it is not known whether infants are capable of binding a human representation to these displays. Furthermore, it has been suggested that infants do not encode the same physical properties for humans and…