The developmental origins of object categories: how motion cues and labels bootstrap early categorization skills

对象类别的发展起源：运动提示和标签如何引导早期分类技能

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-05090
• 负责人: PoulinDubois, Diane
• 金额: $ 2.91万
• 依托单位: Concordia University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=662515
• 关键词: developmental; origins; object; categories; how

Partitioning the world into meaningful categories is a challenging task, especially considering the vast amount of information that could be recruited in the process (Cohen & Lefebvre, 2017). The early emergence of categorization skills allows children to make sense of the vast diversity of objects and entities in their environment. In particular, to categorize a given entity as being either animate or inanimate is thought to be a fundamental process characterizing human perception and cognition (e.g. Opfer & Gelman, 2010). In order to form such categories, children must perceive entities as alike, that is, employ some type of similarity rule to group them together. How do infants successfully organize the world into meaningful categories? In recent years, tremendous strides have been made toward investigating the conditions under which infants form categories, as well as the types of information that they consider in doing so (see Pauen, Birgit, Hoehl, & Bechtel, 2015 and Poulin-Dubois & Pauen, 2017 for recent reviews). Using research procedures that are appropriate for preverbal infants, it has been found that infants discriminate global categories like animals, vehicles, and furniture earlier in life than more fine-grained basic-level categories within each global class, such as cats and dogs, chairs and tables, or cars and trucks (Pauen, 2002). Since discovering this shift, researchers have been trying to understand the mental processes underlying category discrimination at a preverbal age, thereby focusing on whether infants develop knowledge-based representations for categories before language comes into play (Poulin-Dubois & Pauen, 2017). However, little is known about the mechanisms that allow children to focus their attention on what is most relevant to categorization. How do infants determine which objects to compare to each other? How do they determine which properties of those objects to focus on? Which motion cues are first associated to animate beings? Is biological motion a privileged cue for such distinction? Finally, how does the emergence of language promote categorization of objects at less-inclusive level, such as the basic level? Regarding the last issue, labels are considered to boost object categorization by allowing infants to focus on commonalities (Ferguson & Waxman, 2017). When the same noun is applied consistently to a set of distinct objects, both infants and adults alike are more likely to represent them as members of the same object category (Keates & Graham, 2008; Lupyan, Rakison & McClelland, 2007; Waxman & Booth, 2001; 2003). However, the exact function of labelling is unclear as well as whether bilingual children benefit as much from language when forming categories given their strategy to map more than one word to an object. The series of studies to be conducted in the context of the current research program attempts to fill these gaps.**

将世界划分为有意义的类别是一项具有挑战性的任务，特别是考虑到在此过程中可能会招募大量信息（Cohen &列费夫尔，2017）。分类能力的早期出现使儿童能够理解其环境中各种各样的物体和实体。特别是，将给定实体分类为有生命或无生命被认为是表征人类感知和认知的基本过程（例如Opfer & Gelman，2010）。为了形成这样的类别，儿童必须将实体视为相似的，也就是说，采用某种类型的相似性规则将它们分组在一起。婴儿如何成功地将世界组织成有意义的类别？近年来，在调查婴儿形成类别的条件以及他们在这样做时考虑的信息类型方面取得了巨大进展（参见Pauen，Birgit，Hoehl和Bechtel，2015和Poulin-Dubois和Pauen，2017最近的评论）。研究人员使用了适合于语言发育前婴儿的研究程序，发现婴儿在生命早期就能区分动物、车辆和家具等全局类别，而不是区分每个全局类别中更细粒度的基本级别类别，如猫和狗、椅子和桌子，或汽车和卡车（Pauen，2002）。自从发现这种转变以来，研究人员一直试图了解在言语年龄之前类别歧视背后的心理过程，从而关注婴儿是否在语言发挥作用之前发展了基于知识的类别表征（Poulin-Dubois & Pauen，2017）。然而，很少有人知道的机制，使儿童的注意力集中在什么是最相关的分类。婴儿如何确定哪些物体可以相互比较？他们如何确定要关注这些对象的哪些属性？哪些运动线索首先与有生命的生物相关联？生物运动是这种区别的一个特殊线索吗？最后，语言的出现是如何促进在包容性较低的层次（如基本层次）上对对象进行范畴化的？关于最后一个问题，标签被认为可以通过让婴儿专注于共性来提高物体分类（Ferguson & Waxman，2017）。当同一个名词被一致地用于一组不同的物体时，婴儿和成人都更有可能将它们表示为同一物体类别的成员（Keates & Graham，2008; Lupyan，Rakison & McClelland，2007; Waxman & Booth，2001; 2003）。然而，标签的确切功能尚不清楚，以及双语儿童在形成类别时是否从语言中受益，因为他们的策略是将多个单词映射到一个对象。在当前研究计划的背景下进行的一系列研究试图填补这些空白。