2-031 - General and Specific Influences on Learning in Infancy

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Learning during the first two years builds the foundation for later cognitive, language, and perceptual processing. Regularities in the learning environment -- including words, perceptual entities, and social context-- shape not just what infants learn but how they learn. How these regularities interact to produce more or less specific knowledge is not well understood. The first two papers provide different examples of generalized learning across the first two years. The first speaker presents findings suggesting that learning to match individual-level labels with individual novel objects in 6- to 9-month-olds results in process-specific learning that generalizes to untrained objects within the same category and to face processing. No such learning was seen after learning category-level labels for the same objects. The second talk presents results with 9- to 22-month-olds that examine how infants form generalized word learning strategies from social interactions with parents. The findings suggest that the power of novel words to direct attention to objects is the generalized consequence of the learned relations between the social cues parents use to direct attention and their naming of objects. The third speaker presents a computational model for understanding the development of individuation and categorization. The model is applied to the issues of how 6- to 9-month-olds come to display decreased (1) individuation for faces from other-race classes, and (2) differential responding to different other-race face classes based on differential experience. The discussant reviews statistical learning in infants and relates this learning to key findings presented in the three talks.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Lisa Sarah Scott, University of Massachusetts- Amherst

Discussant

• Richard N Aslin, Univ of Rochester

Individual Presentations

• Generalized Learning After Novel Object Training in Infancy - Presenting Author: Lisa Sarah Scott, University of Massachusetts- Amherst; Eswen Elizabeth Fava, UMASS Amherst

• The Attention-Directing Power of Words Begins with the Co-Occurrence of Hands, Eyes, and Words - Presenting Author: Linda B Smith, Indiana University; Chen Yu, Indiana University

• Simulating Classification of Face Race by Infants: Similarities and Differences Between Model and Infant Looking Performance - Presenting Author: Benjamin Balas, North Dakota State University; Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware