How Infants form Categories

Publisher Summary Categorization is an essential perceptual–cognitive activity that enables the reduction of the enormous diversity in the world to a manageable level. A typical categorization experiment involves two phases: (1) training subjects with a set of exemplars from a given category, which is followed by (2) a test with a mixture of new exemplars from the same category and nonexemplars. The degree to which subjects correctly sort these test items into category members versus nonmembers is taken as evidence for categorization. There are a number of similarities between infant and adult categorization processes. Infants, like adults, are able to abstract a prototypic representation containing the average of experienced dimensional values. By 10 months of age, infants are rather sophisticated in their categorization abilities, and these abilities develop considerably over the course of the first year. The developmental studies support the existence of two transitions across age in the perception of correlated attributes. First, there appears to be a developmental trend from the representation of feature-specific information to the representation of feature combinations. Second, there exists a transition from processing relations among features of a single pattern or object to processing correlations in the context of a category.

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