description): The proposed research will examine infants' attention to appearance-function correlations in objects and infants' attention to appearance-behavior correlations in people. Two major sets of studies are proposed. One set of studies will use an exploratory play task to assess infants attention to the relationship between an object's appearance and its function. Infants will be shown objects in which a particular appearance-function relationship is maintained and their actions on the objects will be recorded. The particular surface features (shape and color) which are correlated with the object's function will be manipulated in order to determine whether infants' are biased to attend to one feature over another. The effects of linguistic input on this process will also be examined. In a second set of studies, a visual habituation task will be used to assess infants' attention to the relationship between a person's appearance and their behavior. Infants will be habituated to scenes displaying different individuals performing different behaviors. Infants will be tested on scenes that either maintain, or violate, the familiar person-behavior correlations. Studies will examine infants' attention to these correlations within individual people as well as within salient social categories, in particular, gender categories.
| Oakes, L M; Madole, K L (2000) The future of infant categorization research: a process-oriented approach. Child Dev 71:119-26 |
