Infants' self-generated visual statistics support object and category learning

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PROJECT SUMMARY Human visual object recognition is remarkable in its ability to recognize individual objects in challenging circumstances and to rapidly recognize even novel instances of tens of thousands of everyday categories. Although a great deal is known about these processes at maturity, very little is known about their development especially with respect to common everyday objects and the experiences that support robust object recognition and categorization. This gap is critical because object recognition and categorization support early word learning, physical problem solving, and the later learning of orthographies and mathematical symbols. This research projects focuses on visual object learning in 1 year old toddlers, a developmental period that at the front end of marked advances in visual object recognition and a period in which children with multiple risk factors begin to fall behind the normative developmental trajectory. The approach focuses on the properties of real- world visual experiences that support learning to recognize individual objects in challenging visual contexts and generalizing that learning to same category members. The method uses head-mounted eye-trackers to capture field-of-view images from 100 infants 17 to 22 months of age as they spontaneously interact and play with objects. Through active interactions with objects infants generates their own packets of visual data for learning. Multiple visual properties relevant to object perception will be algorithmically measured and quantified. Toddlers’ recognition of the actively-engaged object and a novel object from the same category will be measured in challenging benchmark contexts including clutter, occlusion, and different views. Category generalization will be measured in a name generalization task. Advanced statistics and machine learning will determine the visual properties of self-generated experiences that support infants object recognition and categorization. The research will provide the first characterization of the natural visual statistics of toddlers’ active interactions with objects and potentially transformative evidence that the developmental foundation for human prowess in visual object categorization lies not in experiences with many different instances of a single category, the standard assumption, but in active visual experiences with individual objects. Moreover, infants at risk for Developmental Language Delay and Autism show disruptions in early object name learning that have been recently linked to disruptions in visual learning about objects. The project includes preliminary analyses of infants at risk in preparation for the next step in the long-term research program.