The Importance of Starting Blurry: Simulating Improved Basic-Level Category Learning in Infants Due to Weak Visual Acuity

At the earliest ages of development, perceptual maturation is generally considered as a functional constraint to recognize or categorize the stimuli of the environment. However, using a computer simulation of retinal development using Gabor wavelets to simulate the output of the V1 complex cells (Jones & Palmer, 1987), we showed that reducing the range of the spatial frequencies from the retinal map to V1 decreases the variance distribution within a category. The consequence of this is to decrease the difference between two exemplars of the same category, but to increase the difference between exemplars from two different categories. These results show that reduced perceptual acuity produces an advantage for differentiating basic-level categories. Finally, we show that the present simulations using Gabor-filtered input instead of feature -based input coding provide a pattern of statistical data convergent with previously published results in infant categorization (e.g., Mareschal & French, 1997; Mareschal et al, 2000; French et al, 2001).

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