The Influence of Shape Similarity and Shared Labels on Infants' Inductive Inferences about Nonobvious Object Properties

This study examined the influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-old infants' inductive inferences. In three experiments, a total of 144 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2001-11, Vol.72 (6), p.1653-1673
Main Authors: Welder, Andrea N., Graham, Susan A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Babies
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child psychology
Children
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition - physiology
Cognition and Language
Cognitive Development
Concept Formation - physiology
Developmental psychology
Experimentation
Family studies
Female
Form Perception - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Generalization
Humans
Induction
Inductive reasoning
Infancy
Infant
Infants
Inferences
Labeling (of Objects)
Labelling
Legal objections
Male
Newborn. Infant
Nouns
Object Characteristics
Perceptual similarity
Performance Factors
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Random Allocation
Similarities
T tests
Toddlers
Visual Stimuli
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Summary:This study examined the influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-old infants' inductive inferences. In three experiments, a total of 144 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity to the target. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape (Experiment 1). When objects were labeled with novel nouns, infants relied both on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties (Experiment 2). Finally, when objects were labeled with familiar nouns, infants generalized the properties to those objects that shared the same label, regardless of shape similarity (Experiment 3). The results of these experiments delineate the role of perceptual similarity and conceptual information in guiding infants' inductive inferences.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/1467-8624.00371