School-Aged Children Learn Novel Categories on the Basis of Distributional Information

Categorization of sensory stimuli is a vital process in understanding the world. In this paper we show that distributional learning plays a role in learning novel object categories in school-aged children. An 11-step continuum was constructed based on two novel animate objects by morphing one object...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in psychology 2022-01, Vol.12, p.799241-799241
Main Authors: Broedelet, Iris, Boersma, Paul, Rispens, Judith
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
distributional learning
novel object categorization
Psychology
statistical learning
visual distributional learning
visual statistical learning
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Summary:Categorization of sensory stimuli is a vital process in understanding the world. In this paper we show that distributional learning plays a role in learning novel object categories in school-aged children. An 11-step continuum was constructed based on two novel animate objects by morphing one object into the other in 11 equal steps. Forty-nine children (7-9 years old) were subjected to one of two familiarization conditions during which they saw tokens from the continuum. The conditions differed in the position of the distributional peaks along the continuum. After familiarization it was tested how the children categorized the stimuli. Results show that, in line with our expectations, familiarization condition influenced categorization during the test phase, indicating that the frequency distribution of tokens in the input had induced novel object category formation. These results suggest that distributional learning could play an important role in categorizing sensory stimuli throughout life.
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.799241