Infants demonstrate an impressive capacity for forming categories despite the vast quantities of information they must process in doing so. The principle focus of this proposal is on attention to object function as one potential constraint supporting this fundamental cognitive capacity. Existing evidence highlights the importance of object function as an indicator of category foundaries for both adults and children. Our own research goes further, suggesting that object functions make a greater contribution by facilitating the formation of new categories in infancy. Infants who observed the function of a series of novel artifacts were particularly likely to detect other perceptual similarities among those objects, and to respond to them categorically. Although intriguing, this initial effect requires substantial explication. The three experiments outlined here utilize forced-choice and Sequential touching measures to evaluate the nature and magnitude of function's influence on early categorization. Specifically, we explore the potential advantages conferred by object function on 1) the speed of category acquisition, 2) the retention of resulting representations and 3) the generalizability of those representations to other contexts. These studies should provide valuable insights into the impact of object function as a constraint on early categorization. In so doing, it will have broad implications for current theories of categorization in infancy and beyond. The proposed studies will also lay the groundwork for a systematic study of the mechanisms underlying the facilitative effect of function. Not only will they highlight the value of better understanding this phenomenon, but they will establish the viability of new stimuli and methods for pursuing that understanding.
| Booth, Amy E; Schuler, Kathryn; Zajicek, Ruth (2010) Specifying the role of function in infant categorization. Infant Behav Dev 33:672-84 |
| Booth, Amy E (2009) Causal supports for early word learning. Child Dev 80:1243-50 |
| Booth, Amy E (2008) The cause of infant categorization? Cognition 106:984-93 |
