The emergence of perceptual category representations in young infants: a connectionist analysis.

There has been recent interest in the idea that principles governing learning in connectionist networks can form the basis for an alternative understanding of developmental processes (Elman, Bates, Karmiloff-Smith, Johnson, Parisi, & Plunkett, 1996). The present paper can be viewed as a case example of the usefulness (and limitations) of connectionist modeling for the study of infant cognition. Specifically, the paper reports on a series of connectionist models designed to analyze the factors responsible for the emergence of global-level and basic-level category representations in young infants. The models (1) simulated the formation of global-level and basic-level representations, (2) revealed a global-to-basic order of category emergence, (3) uncovered the formation of two distinct global-level representations-an initial "self-organizing" perceptual global level and a subsequently "trained" arbitrary (i.e., nonperceptual) global level, and (4) displayed a gradual transition from perceptual global-level to perceptual basic-level representation with increasing exposure to training stimuli. Hypotheses for empirical investigations of category development in infants that follow from the modeling efforts are discussed.

[1]  L. Frank.  The Society for Research in Child Development , 1935 .

[2]  M. Posner,et al.  On the genesis of abstract ideas. , 1968, Journal of experimental psychology.

[3]  J. Fagan,et al.  Infant recognition memory: the effects of length of familiarization and type of discrimination task. , 1974, Child development.

[4]  Wayne D. Gray,et al.  Basic objects in natural categories , 1976, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  M. Strauss,et al.  Abstraction of prototypical information by adults and 10-month-old infants. , 1979, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[6]  E. H. Cornell,et al.  Infants' recognition memory, forgetting, and savings. , 1979, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[7]  P. Kuhl.  Speech perception in early infancy: perceptual constancy for spectrally dissimilar vowel categories. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[8]  E. Markman,et al.  Developmental differences in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. , 1980 .

[9]  Kemler Nelson,et al.  New Issues in the Study of Infant Categorization: A Reply to Husaim and Cohen. , 1981 .

[10]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Infant Learning of Ill-Defined Categories. , 1981 .

[11]  C. Mervis,et al.  Order of acquisition of subordinate-, basic-, and superordinate-level categories. , 1982 .

[12]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Ad hoc categories , 1983, Memory & cognition.

[13]  J.A. Anderson,et al.  Theory of categorization based on distributed memory storage. , 1984 .

[14]  T. Sherman.  Categorization skills in infants. , 1985, Child development.

[15]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Learning internal representations by error propagation , 1986 .

[16]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations , 1986 .

[17]  C. Mervis.  Child-basic object categories and early lexical development. , 1987 .

[18]  I. Biederman.  Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. , 1987, Psychological review.

[19]  James L. McClelland.  Parallel Distributed Processing: Implications for Cognition and Development , 1988 .

[20]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Self-Organization and Associative Memory , 1988 .

[21]  G. Rhodes.  Looking at Faces: First-Order and Second-Order Features as Determinants of Facial Appearance , 1988, Perception.

[22]  J. Mandler,et al.  The cradle of categorization: Is the basic level basic? , 1988 .

[23]  P. Smolensky.  On the proper treatment of connectionism , 1988, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[24]  Jerome A. Feldman,et al.  Connectionist Models and Their Properties , 1982, Cogn. Sci..

[25]  U. Neisser.  Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization , 1989 .

[26]  B. Younger,et al.  Infants' detection of correlations among feature categories. , 1990, Child development.

[27]  Risto Miikkulainen,et al.  Natural Language Processing With Modular PDP Networks and Distributed Lexicon , 1991, Cogn. Sci..

[28]  Philippe G. Schyns,et al.  A Modular Neural Network Model of Concept Acquisition , 1991, Cogn. Sci..

[29]  Thomas R. Shultz,et al.  Simulating Stages of Human Cognitive Development With Connectionist Models , 1991, ML.

[30]  J. Mandler,et al.  Separating the sheep from the goats: Differentiating global categories , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[31]  J. Tanaka,et al.  Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder? , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[32]  Annette Karmiloff-Smith,et al.  Nature, Nurture and PDP: Preposterous Developmental Postulates? , 1992 .

[33]  Chris Sinha,et al.  Symbol Grounding or the Emergence of Symbols? Vocabulary Growth in Children and a Connectionist Net , 1992 .

[34]  M. Young,et al.  Sparse population coding of faces in the inferotemporal cortex. , 1992, Science.

[35]  B Younger.  Developmental change in infant categorization: the perception of correlations among facial features. , 1992, Child development.

[36]  K. Plunkett,et al.  Connectionism and developmental theory , 1992 .

[37]  T. Shallice,et al.  Deep Dyslexia: A Case Study of , 1993 .

[38]  J. Mandler,et al.  Concept formation in infancy , 1993 .

[39]  Peter M. Todd,et al.  Learning and connectionist representations , 1993 .

[40]  Andy Clark,et al.  Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change , 1993 .

[41]  A. Karmiloff-Smith,et al.  The cognizer's innards: A psychological and philosophical perspective on the development of thought. , 1993 .

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

[43]  J. Elman.  Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small , 1993, Cognition.

[44]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. , 1994, Child development.

[45]  P D Eimas,et al.  Development of exclusivity in perceptually based categories of young infants. , 1994, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[46]  G. Kane.  Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol 1: Foundations, vol 2: Psychological and Biological Models , 1994 .

[47]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Why there are complementary learning systems in the hippocampus and neocortex: insights from the successes and failures of connectionist models of learning and memory. , 1995, Psychological review.

[48]  Alan L. Yuille,et al.  FORMS: A flexible object recognition and modelling system , 1995, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[49]  Kim Plunkett,et al.  Developing object permanence: A connectionist model , 1995 .

[50]  A Oliver,et al.  The emergence of hierarchical clustered representations in a Hebbian neural network model that simulates aspects of development in the neocortex. , 1996, Network.

[51]  Gundeep Behl‐Chadha.  Basic-level and superordinate-like categorical representations in early infancy , 1996, Cognition.

[52]  J. Elman,et al.  Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development , 1996 .

[53]  The role of parts and structure in categorisation by young children , 1996 .

[54]  Peter C. M. Molenaar,et al.  On the Validity of Simulating Stagewise Development by Means of PDP Networks: Application of Catastrophe Analysis and an Experimental Test of Rule-Like Network Performance , 1996, Cogn. Sci..

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

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

[57]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Exercises in Rethinking Innateness: A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations , 1997 .

[58]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Rethinking infant knowledge: toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks. , 1997, Psychological review.

[59]  G. Butterworth,et al.  Infants' use of object parts in early categorization. , 1998, Developmental psychology.