Ten-month-olds' selective use of visual dimensions in category learning.
There is now general consensus that infants can use several different visual properties as the basis for categorization. Nonetheless, little is known about when and whether infants can be guided by contextual information to select the relevant properties from amongst those available to them. We show here that by 10 months of age infants can be biased, through observational learning, to use one or the other of two object properties for classification. Two groups of infants watched an actress classifying objects by either shape (the Shape group) or surface pattern (the Pattern group). When subsequently presented with two test trials which contradicted either one or the other of the classification rules, infants in the two groups looked longer to the classification event that was incompatible with the rule that group had been familiarized to. These results are discussed with reference to the development of selective feature processing in infancy.
Gliga
Teodora
T
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. t.gliga@bbk.ac.uk
Mareschal
Denis
D
Johnson
Mark H
MH
D000367:Age Factors; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology