A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach to Semantic Cognition: Applications to Conceptual Development
Timothy T. Rogers, James L. McClelland · Psychology Press eBooks · 2005
Although conceptual development in infancy is a wide and varying field of study that encompasses many different points of view, there are, broadly speaking, two sets of empirical findings that are relevant to understanding the competencies that emerge over the first year of life. First, infants as young as 3 to 4 months are sensitive to visual similarities existing across discriminably different stimulus events, and can capitalize on these to guide their behavior in preferential-looking and dishabituation studies. In some cases, this perceptual learning skill is sufficient for very young infants to discriminate natural semantic categories, on the basis of the visual similarity and variability of the stimulus items encountered during habituation and test (e.g., Eimas & Quinn, 1994). However, at the youngest testable ages, infant behavior in this respect seems to be strongly linked to the visual structure of the specific items encountered during habituation and test, and does not appear to reflect stored knowledge about the conceptual relationships that may exist among stimulus items (Mareschal, French, & Quinn, 2000; Quinn & Johnson, 1997). Thus several researchers have suggested that very young infants are capable of forming “perceptual categories” to guide their expectations in looking tasks.