A connectionist account of asymmetric category learning in early infancy
Catégorie
Journal Article
Auteurs
Mareschal, D., French, R. M., Quinn, P. C.
Année
2000
Titre
A connectionist account of asymmetric category learning in early infancy
Journal / Livre / Conférence
Developmental Psychology
Résumé
Young infants show unexplained asymmetries in the exclusivity of categories formed on the basis of visually presented stimuli. A connectionist model is described that shows similar exclusivity asymmetries when categorizing the same stimuli presented to infants. The asymmetries can be explained in terms of an associative learning mechanism, distributed internal representations, and the statistics of the feature distributions in the stimuli. The model was used to explore the robustness of this asymmetry. The model predicts that the asymmetry will persist when a category is acquired in the presence of mixed category exemplars. An experiment with 3-4-month-olds showed that asymmetric exclusivity persisted in the presence of mixed-exemplar familiarization, thereby confirming the model's prediction.
Issue
5
Volume
36
Pages
635-645