News Finding: For instance, the difference between search times, with and without naming the target object, indicate a key role for a kind of brief visual memory known as working memory, that helps us remember what we just saw as we look to something new.
Paper Finding: The present findings offer a potential pathway to understand the in-task mechanisms that lead to biased attention to object shape in naming tasks: Once a child has learned the names of a sufficient number of basic-level categories, naming -even with novel names -may lead to the biased encoding of shape and more active visual working memory representations that then guide attention in novel name learning tasks.
News Context: Vales said their research results "begin to tell us precisely how words help, the kinds of cognitive processes words tap into to change how children behave. For instance, the difference between search times, with and without naming the target object, indicate a key role for a kind of brief visual memory known as working memory, that helps us remember what we just saw as we look to something new. Words put ideas in working memory faster than images."
Paper Context: By one account, this shape bias emerges as a secondorder generalization across known names and categories and is cued by the common linguistic contexts of naming things . The present findings offer a potential pathway to understand the in-task mechanisms that lead to biased attention to object shape in naming tasks: Once a child has learned the names of a sufficient number of basic-level categories, naming -even with novel names -may lead to the biased encoding of shape and more active visual working memory representations that then guide attention in novel name learning tasks. The present findings and discussion are also relevant to a large literature on the development of working memory in children.