The Cat is out of the Bag: The Joint Influence of Previous Experience and Looking Behavior on Infant Categorization

We examined the effect of 4-month-old infants' previous experience with dogs, cats, or both and their online looking behavior on their learning of the adult-defined category of cat in a visual familiarization task. Four-month-old infants' (N = 123) learning in the laboratory was jointly determined by whether or not they had experience with pets at home and how much they shifted their gaze back and forth between the stimuli during familiarization. Specifically, only infants with pets at home who also exhibited high levels of switching during familiarization remembered the individual cat exemplars or formed a summary representation of those cats. These results are consistent with recent theorizing about the processes of how infants' categorical representations are formed, and provide new understanding into how infants' categorization unfolds over time.

[1]  Linda B. Smith.  From Knowledge to Knowing: Real Progress in the Study of Infant Categorization. , 2000, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[2]  P. Quinn.  Development of subordinate-level categorization in 3- to 7-month-old infants. , 2004, Child development.

[3]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. , 2005, Developmental science.

[4]  E. R. Siqueland,et al.  The nature and structure of infant form categories , 1983 .

[5]  B. Younger.  The segregation of items into categories by ten-month-old infants. , 1985, Child development.

[6]  Robert M. French,et al.  Asymmetric interference in 3- to 4-month-olds' sequential category learning , 2002, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  S A Rose,et al.  Modifying the distribution of attention in infants. , 2001, Child development.

[8]  G. Bronson,et al.  Infant differences in rate of visual encoding. , 1991, Child development.

[9]  P. Quinn.  Beyond prototypes: asymmetries in infant categorization and what they teach us about the mechanisms guiding early knowledge acquisition. , 2002, Advances in child development and behavior.

[10]  Lisa M Oakes,et al.  Hold your horses: how exposure to different items influences infant categorization. , 2007, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[11]  Beyond the distributional input? A developmental investigation of asymmetry in infants' categorization of cats and dogs. , 2005, Developmental science.

[12]  D. Rakison,et al.  Infants' sensitivity to correlations between static and dynamic features in a category context. , 2004, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[13]  Lisa M. Oakes,et al.  Early Category and Concept Development: Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion , 2008 .

[14]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[15]  R. French,et al.  A connectionist account of asymmetric category learning in early infancy. , 2000, Developmental psychology.

[16]  E. Thelen,et al.  Using dynamic field theory to rethink infant habituation. , 2006, Psychological review.

[17]  E. Spelke,et al.  Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  P D Eimas,et al.  Perceptual cues that permit categorical differentiation of animal species by infants. , 1996, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[19]  Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants. , 2007 .

[20]  Martial Mermillod,et al.  The role of bottom-up processing in perceptual categorization by 3- to 4-month-old infants: simulations and data. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[21]  J. Colombo,et al.  Individual differences in infant visual attention: are short lookers faster processors or feature processors? , 1991, Child development.

[22]  R. A. Haaf,et al.  Four-Month-Old Infants’ Categorization of Animals: Does Any Body Part Hold Privileged Status? , 2004 .

[23]  B. Younger,et al.  A Global-to-Basic Trend in Early Categorization: Evidence From a Dual-Category Habituation Task. , 2000, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[24]  S. Pauen.  Evidence for knowledge-based category discrimination in infancy. , 2002, Child development.

[25]  Barbara A. Younger,et al.  A Comparison of Visual Familiarization and Object-Examining Measures of Categorization in 9-Month-Old Infants , 2003 .

[26]  M J Tarr,et al.  Perceptual categorization of cat and dog silhouettes by 3- to 4-month-old infants. , 2001, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[27]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Where Infants Look Determines How They See: Eye Movements and Object Perception Performance in 3-Month-Olds. , 2004, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[28]  The distribution of visual attention in infants. , 1997, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[29]  Denis Mareschal,et al.  Basic-level category discriminations by 7- and 9-month-olds in an object examination task. , 2003, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[30]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  The place of perception in children's concepts ☆ , 1993 .

[31]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Evidence for Representations of Perceptually Similar Natural Categories by 3-Month-Old and 4-Month-Old Infants , 1993, Perception.

[32]  Y. Bar-Haim,et al.  Nature and Nurture in Own-Race Face Processing , 2006, Psychological science.

[33]  Young infants' use of facial information in the categorical differentiation of natural animal species: The effect of inversion , 1996 .

[34]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Representation of the Gender of Human Faces by Infants: A Preference for Female , 2002, Perception.

[35]  J. Colombo,et al.  Individual differences in infant visual attention: four-month-olds' discrimination and generalization of global and local stimulus properties. , 1993, Child development.

[36]  J. Feldman,et al.  Infant visual recognition memory: independent contributions of speed and attention. , 2003, Developmental psychology.

[37]  D. Gentner,et al.  Comparison in the Development of Categories , 1999 .

[38]  L. Oakes,et al.  A Comparison of Infants' Categorization in Paired and Successive Presentation Familiarization Tasks. , 2005, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[39]  H A Ruff.  The function of shifting fixations in the visual perception of infants. , 1975, Child development.

[40]  B. Younger,et al.  Detecting correlations among form attributes: An object-examining test with infants , 1998 .