Development of Perceptual Categorization in Infants

分类的使用——例如，狗、动物、椅子、家具——是人类认知的核心，是感知、记忆和推理能力的基础。因此，关于在婴儿期何时以及如何出现分类表征的问题是研究知觉和认知发展的核心。这个项目的目的是进一步加深我们对幼儿复杂的、基于感知的分类表征发展的认识。研究结果将帮助我们了解儿童如何学习，并与儿童早期教育和发育障碍有关。本研究将采用熟悉-新奇偏好程序进行一系列实验，以研究婴儿在一岁期间在上级（如动物、家具）、基本（如狗、椅子）和下级（如德国牧羊犬、客厅椅子）层次上形成的分类表征。具体的实验计划来检验：(1)婴儿第一次形成上级、基本和下级类别表征的年龄；（二）上级类别的表述是否先于基层和下级类别的表述；（三）方法上的因素，例如提供给婴儿的范例数目，是否构成了先前关于上级和基本类别表征发展的研究结果的明显差异；(4)婴儿在形成不同层次的类别表征时提取刺激的哪些表面属性（如整体形状、特定部位、颜色、纹理等）。

The use of categories - for example, dog, animal, chair, furniture - is central to human cognition, underpinning the ability to perceive, remember, and reason. Questions concerning when and how categorical representations emerge in infancy is therefore central to the study of perceptual and cognitive development. The aim of this project is to further our knowledge about the development of complex, perceptually-based categorical representations in young infants. The results will help us to understand how children learn, and should have relevance for issues concerning early childhood education, and developmental disabilities.A series of experiments using the familiarization-novelty preference procedure will be conducted to study the categorical representations formed by infants at superordinate (e.g., animal, furniture), basic (e.g., dog, chair), and subordinate (e.g., German Shepherd, living room chair) levels across the first year of life. Specific experiments are planned to examine: (1) the ages at which infants first develop representations for superordinate, basic, and subordinate categories; (2) whether representations for superordinate categories precede those at the basic and subordinate levels; (3) whether methodological factors such as the number of exemplars presented to the infant underlie apparent differences in previous findings on the development of representations for superordinate and basic categories; and (4) what surface attributes of the stimuli (e.g., overall shape, particular parts, color, texture, etc.) infants extract when forming category representations at different levels.