Categorization skills in infants.
The prototypical category-learning experiences with which infants are confronted are ones in which they have had prior experience with and have clearly noted the differences among a set of objects. Their task, then, is to notice also the similarities among the objects and to form a category based on these similarities. The goals of the current experiments were to create a laboratory situation in which it was clear that 10-month-old infants were distinguishing one category exemplar from another, and then to determine the structure of the category representation the infants developed under these learning conditions. A set of artificially created face stimuli was used in which the mean and modal prototypes were distinct. The infants' performance could not be explained by the context theory; they appear to have retained a count of the feature values observed during study. These data give support to the claim that prior to language, infants have available strategies for abstracting category-level information from their perceptual experiences with discriminable objects and events.
D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012718:Set, Psychology