Jessica S Horst, Lisa M Oakes, and Kelly L Madole (2005)
What does it look like and what can it do? Category structure influences how infants categorize.
Child Dev 76(3):614-31.
Despite a large body of research demonstrating the kinds of categories to which infants respond, few studies have directly assessed how infants' categorization unfolds over time. Four experiments used a visual familiarization task to evaluate 10-month-old infants' (N = 98) learning of exemplars characterized by commonalities in appearance or function. When learning exemplars with a common function, infants initially responded to the common feature, apparently forming a category, and only learned the individual features with more extensive familiarization. When learning exemplars with a common appearance, infants initially learned the individual features and apparently only formed a category with more extensive familiarization. The results are discussed in terms of models of category learning.
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Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco