Infants’ learning about object properties and categories in diverse environments

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Learning about object properties and categories is critical to early cognitive development. Nevertheless, such learning is complex, especially in real-world settings, relying on sensitivities to both visual and linguistic information. This symposium explores how infants discriminate and categorize objects in ways that may affect their learning in diverse contexts. Papers 1 and 2 focus on whether infants’ visual sensitivities to the basic geometric features of objects are robust to varied contexts. Paper 1 suggests that 6- to 9-month-olds’ detection of an object’s mirror-image might be observable only with highly sensitive lab tasks. Paper 2 finds that while 7-month-olds’ discrimination of the basic shape properties of objects is robust in controlled lab environments, it may not drive object discrimination in cluttered home environments. Papers 3 and 4 focus on the link between visual and linguistic information in supporting infants’ formation of object categories. Paper 3 suggests that 4-month-olds’ ability to use language to form object categories is generalizable to both hearing and spoken language, although this generalizability disappears by 5 months in hearing infants. Paper 4 finds that 7- to 11-month-olds’ learning of object categories in cluttered home environments is supported by only rare co-occurrences of a visual object with its corresponding linguistic label. Together, these papers shed new light on the development of infants’ sensitivities to objects in the first year of life. They also reveal how these sensitivities support infants’ behavior and learning both in the lab and in the complex environments of everyday life.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Moira R. Dillon, New York University

Individual Presentations

• Assessing the robustness of mental rotation in infancy: the importance of task and context - Presenting Author: Aaron Gerald Beckner, University of South Carolina; Non-Presenting Author: Annika Voss, University of California - Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Sheridan, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Marianella Casasola, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Lisa M Oakes, University of California - Davis

• Bringing home Baby Euclid: Evaluating infants’ basic shape discrimination using the online platform Lookit - Presenting Author: Agata Bochynska, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Kimberly Scott, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Non-Presenting Author: Moira R. Dillon, New York University

• Sign Language Promotes Object Categorization in Young Hearing Infants - Presenting Author: Miriam A Novack, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Diane Brentari, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Sandra R Waxman, Northwestern University

• Rare co-occurrences but frequent visual objects and object names: the at-home data for object name learning - Presenting Author: Elizabeth Murphy Clerkin, Indiana University - Bloomington; Non-Presenting Author: Linda B. Smith, Indiana University - Bloomington