Are developmental theories of learning paying attention to attention

ABSTRACT Currently available empirical evidence is often insufficient to distinguish among developmental theories of word learning, categorization, and induction. This paper argues that theories of conceptual development should be evaluated not only on the basis of their ability to account for empirical findings, but also on the basis of their consistency with a broader body of knowledge, particularly with the known properties of developing selective attention. The paper presents a brief overview of the behavioral and neurophysiological findings on the development of selective attention. These findings are argued to be inconsistent with the approaches assuming that early in development learning is driven by conceptual knowledge and naive theories, but provide support to the approaches arguing that early learning may be impervious to conceptual influences. KEYWORDS: cognitive development, categorization, induction, word learning, attention. Current theories of conceptual development can be broadly characterized as those arguing that early learning relies predominantly on the low-level domain-general mechanisms of perception, attention, and memory (Sloutsky & Fisher, 2005; McClelland & Rogers, 2003; Rakison, 2003; Sloutsky, 2003; Samuelson & Smith, 2000a) and those arguing that low-level mechanisms alone are insufficient to account for learning early in development (Jaswal, 2004; Gelman, 2003; Booth, & Waxman, 2002; Woodward, 2000). Existing empirical evidence often has been consistent with both approaches, or as Smith and Samuelson (2006, p.1342) put it, "proponents of both sides can conduct nearly identical experiments and see the same results as being for and against [the attentional learning account]". This problem is illustrated below using examples of empirical findings coming from two different tasks - a biological induction task and a word learning task. In a typical induction task children are presented with a Target item (e.g., a brown starfish which is labeled "a starfish") and two Test items, Test A (e.g., a brown pinecone labeled "a pinecone") and Test B (e.g., a red starfish labeled "a starfish"). Children are then familiarized with unobservable properties of each Test item (e.g., "this cone has little seeds inside" and "this starfish has little eggs inside") and asked whether the Target item is more likely to share the property with Test A or Test B. For the stimulus set depicted in Figure 1, 4-year-old children are likely to respond that Test B rather than Test A shares the property with the Target (Gelman & Markman, 1986; Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004a). Proponents of alternative approaches to early induction propose markedly different explanations to account for this pattern of responses. According to the Similarity-Based approach, early in development induction is a process of automatic similarity-based generalization, with similarity computed over automatically detected perceptual and linguistic features. In other words, common labels contribute to the overall perceived similarity of presented entities, therefore, children under certain circumstances (e.g., when test objects are equally similar to the target object; cf. Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004a) may be more likely to generalize the property from the Test item that shares a label with the Target (in the above case Test B). According to the Naive Theory approach, "children's categories are theory based: They are constructed not merely on the basis of perceptual characteristics and regularities but on the basis of children's beliefs and assumptions about the world and the way language works children assume that a label provides direct access to an object's kind, and that an object's kind determines what nonobvious properties it is likely to have" (Jaswal, 2004, p. 1872). In other words, it is assumed that for children as young as 2.5 years of age (Gelman & Coley, 1990) common labels indicate membership in the common category, therefore children are likely to generalize the property from Test B to the Target. …