Source: https://kundoc.com/pdf-timing-matters-the-impact-of-label-synchrony-on-infant-categorisation-.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 20:12:25+00:00

Document:
a b s t r a c t The impact of labelling on infant visual categorisation has yielded contradictory outcomes. Some ﬁndings indicate a beneﬁcial role while others point to interference effects in the presence of labels. The locus of these divergent outcomes is largely unclear. We explore the hypothesis that the timing of the label is of crucial importance, proposing that synchronous presentation of words and objects induces a higher processing load than asynchronous presentation (image onset before labelling). A novelty preference experiment with 12-month-olds reveals that synchronous presentation leads to a diminished preference for a novel object on test in comparison to asynchronous labelling, suggesting a detrimental impact on category learning. However, analyses of infants’ gaze patterns to object parts reveal that even synchronous labels do not hinder learning completely. We conclude that synchronous labels interfere with the familiarisation process, but this process involves shifts in familiarity vs. novelty preference rather than overshadowing of visual learning. Besides offering detailed insight into the effects of labelling on infants’ visual attention, these ﬁndings offer the potential to reconcile previous contradictory results. Ó 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (N. Althaus).
The world can be structured in many ways, and the language we learn as children directs the formation of our particular structure. Language is not a cloak following the contours of thought. Languages are molds into which infant minds are poured. (Brown & Lenneberg, 1954, p. 454) The ubiquity of labels in an infant’s environment, both in speech directed at the infant and in conversation between adults overheard by the infant, renders the possibility of linguistic inﬂuence highly plausible (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1996). Shared labels can indicate that dissimilar looking things may share attributes or function (e.g., a bonnet and a boater may both simply be called a ‘‘hat’’). Thus, several studies over the past 20 years have found facilitative effects of labelling on categorisation in pre-linguistic infants between three and twelve months (e.g., Balaban & Waxman, 1997; Ferry, Hespos, & Waxman, 2010; Fulkerson & Waxman, 2007; Waxman & Braun, 2005; Waxman & Markow, 1995).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.02.004 0010-0277/Ó 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
categorisation often use familiarisation stimuli involving object kinds that the infant may well have encountered before, such as toy animals (e.g., Balaban & Waxman, 1997; Ferry et al., 2010; Fulkerson & Waxman, 2007; Waxman & Braun, 2005; Waxman & Markow, 1995), whereas studies reporting interference effects often involve objects that are entirely novel (see Robinson & Sloutsky, 2004; Sloutsky & Robinson, 2008). No study has reported both interference and facilitation effects for the same set of familiarisation stimuli. It is therefore possible that the main factor underlying the discrepancy in outcomes is category novelty or complexity. While category complexity may play a role, we will argue in the present paper that the timing of the label is a crucial factor affecting infants looking behaviour. We will examine the impact of synchronous vs. asynchronous presentation of labels with the same set of objects, and demonstrate that synchronous presentation has a deleterious effect on categorisation as compared to asynchronous or silent presentation, in a novelty preference task. Importantly, learning is successful both in silence and with asynchronous labels. Given that the visual stimuli are identical in both cases, category complexity is not a confound in the present case. Previous interpretations of such interference effects invoke ‘‘auditory overshadowing’’ of the visual stimuli during familiarisation (Robinson & Sloutsky, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Sloutsky & Robinson, 2008). We further investigate this possibility by examining infant attention to object parts during both familiarisation and test. If synchronous labels overshadow the processing of visual stimuli, this should result in information not being encoded. In this case we would expect infants to be impervious to feature distributions of the familiarisation objects. However, if synchronous labels impose a higher perceptual load, visual processing may merely be attenuated without complete failure to encode feature distribution information (Lavie et al., 2009; Robinson & Sloutsky, 2007b). In this case it may still be possible to detect infant sensitivity to the characteristics of the visual object, even in the absence of novelty preference, which is typically used to index category formation.
Fig. 2. A sample test display illustrating relative novelty of objects and parts.
Fig. 1. Example familiarisation set.
Block Fig. 3. Looking time during familiarisation.
Object-based novelty preference scores at test were obtained by dividing the amount of looking time at the out-of-category object by the total looking time accumulated for the trial (within-category and out-of-category objects). Novelty preference scores were normally distributed in all conditions (Shapiro–Wilk, all ps > .65). The results are given in Fig. 4. A one-way ANOVA did not reveal differences between the conditions (F(2, 86) = 1.08, p > .34). Importantly, however, we also conducted planned comparisons against chance for each condition separately. If infants failed to form a category and did not discriminate between the two novel objects, we would expect them to spend approximately 50% of their looking directed at each object. By contrast, if they successfully formed a category, we would expect them to reliably prefer the out-of-category over the within-category novel object. Therefore, planned comparisons against chance (0.5) were conducted for each condition. Infants demonstrated systematic novelty preferences in the Silent and Asynchronous Label conditions (Silent: t(28) = 2.13, p = .04; Asynchronous: t(28) = 4.037, p < 0.001) but not in the Synchronous Label condition (t(28) = 1.066, p = .295, all two-tailed one-sample t-tests against chance). We also identiﬁed the number of infants in each condition who spent more than 50% of looking time at the novel, out-of-category object. This analysis conﬁrmed that a signiﬁcant number of infants in the Asynchronous Label condition demonstrated a novelty preference (N = 22, total: 29, p < .01). For the Silent condition there was a trend in the same direction (N = 19, total: 29, p = .13), but the number of infants demonstrating a novelty preference in the Synchronous condition did not differ from chance (N = 16, total: 29, p > .7, all two-tailed binomial tests). These ﬁndings suggest that infants formed a category during familiarisation in the Silent and Asynchronous Label conditions, but not in the Synchronous Label condition.
suggests that synchronous label presentation does not overshadow visual processing during familiarisation.
Note that infants did not appear to have an inherent preference for the shell. Proportion of leaf looking during the ﬁrst familiarisation trial, which would reﬂect any a priori preferences, did not differ from chance in any of the conditions (all ts < 1.63, ps > .11, all two-tailed t-tests).
Condition Fig. 4. Novelty preference scores on test: ⁄ indicates a result signiﬁcant at the .05-level, ⁄⁄⁄ indicates a result signiﬁcant at the .001-level.
Condition Fig. 5. Difference scores (proportion out-of-category leaf – proportion within-category leaf) for all conditions. ⁄⁄⁄ Indicates a result signiﬁcantly above 0 at the .001-level.
A result signiﬁcantly different from 0 at the .05 level. A result signiﬁcantly different from 0 at the .001 level.
processing load imposed by any coupling of visual and auditory stimuli is also dependent on the visual and auditory complexity or novelty. Robinson and Sloutsky (2007b) found, as mentioned above, that infants’ novelty preference is delayed when familiarisation is accompanied by an unfamiliar sound, but this effect is attenuated when infants are pre-familiarised with this novel sound. Similar mechanisms may apply in the visual domain. The role of category complexity remains elusive, as categories of varying complexity have been employed in past research on the impact of labelling on categorisation but without systematic comparison. Further research will be necessary in order to determine whether the timing of the auditory stimulus can indeed explain the discrepancies between the ﬁndings. However, the current research demonstrates that label synchrony is an important determinant of object preferences in novelty preference tasks. The discrepancy between global looking preferences and part-based results further highlights the limitations of preferential looking as a measure of learning. A decrease in novelty preference scores at the object level does not necessarily imply disruption of visual learning, but can potentially be explained by changes in the speed in which the shift from familiarity to novelty preference is obtained (Hunter & Ames, 1988). Null preferences therefore have to be interpreted with caution, speciﬁcally when comparing conditions that inherently differ in terms of processing load, such as a silent condition vs. one that includes auditory stimuli. The discrepancy we report between objectbased and part-based looking illustrates how more sensitive measures may be obtained with careful stimulus design. In the context of cross-modal processing, synchrony is often claimed to be beneﬁcial, at least for young infants (Gogate et al., 2003). We have argued that the increased processing load due to synchronous presentation appears to slow down category learning. In addition, infants’ cross-modal experience with objects and labels would also appear of central importance. In natural settings, the likelihood of a label occurring at exactly the same time that an object comes into view is rather small. In fact, Pereira et al. (2013) report higher word learning success in toddlers for scenarios in which the labelled object is brought close to the child’s face several seconds prior to the naming event. In terms of learning, asynchronous presentation may offer computational advantages. The opportunity to process visual and auditory information sequentially could be a facilitating factor in the extraction of more complex visual structures – and speciﬁcally the kind of abstract similarity needed for categorisation. To paraphrase Brown and Lenneberg (1954), asynchronous language provides moulds into which infant minds are poured. Acknowledgments This research was supported by Wellcome Grant 084386/Z/07/Z to Kim Plunkett and the Winkler Career Development Fellowship at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, to Nadja Althaus. We wish to thank all parents and infants who participated in this study.
References Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M. (1996). Two-year-olds learn words for absent objects and actions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14, 79–93. Althaus, N., & Mareschal, D. (2014). Labels direct infants’ attention to commonalities during novel category learning. PloS one, 9, e99670. Bahrick, L., & Lickliter, R. (2000). Intersensory redundancy guides attentional selectivity and perceptual learning in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 36, 190. Balaban, M., & Waxman, S. (1997). Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64, 3–26. Baldwin, D. (1991). Infants’ contribution to the achievement of joint reference. Child Development, 62, 875–890. Baldwin, D., & Markman, E. (1989). Establishing word-object relations: A ﬁrst step. Child Development, 60, 381–398. Birnholz, J. C., & Benacerraf, B. R. (1983). The development of human fetal hearing. Science, 222, 516–518. Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and english speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 1–22. Brown, R., & Lenneberg, E. (1954). A study in language and cognition. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 2454–2462. Buswell, G. T. (1935). How people look at pictures: A study of the psychology of perception in art. University of Chicago Press. Colavita, F. B. (1974). Human sensory dominance. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 409–412. Eimas, P. D., & Quinn, P. C. (1994). Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. Child Development, 65, 903–917. Ferry, A., Hespos, S., & Waxman, S. (2010). Categorization in 3- and 4month-old infants: An advantage of words over tones. Child Development, 81, 472–479. Ferry, A., Hespos, S. J., & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 15231–15235. Fulkerson, A., & Waxman, S. (2007). Words (but not tones) facilitate object categorization: Evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds. Cognition, 105, 218–228. GNU Image Manipulation Program (2013). Gogate, L., Bahrick, L., & Watson, J. (2003). A study of multimodal motherese: The role of temporal synchrony between verbal labels and gestures. Child Development, 71, 878–894. Grossmann, T., Gliga, T., Johnson, M., & Mareschal, D. (2009). The neural basis of perceptual category learning in human infants. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 2276–2286. Huettig, F., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). The tug of war between phonological, semantic and shape information in language-mediated visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 460–482. Hunt, E., & Agnoli, F. (1991). The Whorﬁan Hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective. Psychological Review, 98, 377–389. Hunter, M., & Ames, E. (1988). A multifactor model of infant preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. Advances in Infancy Research, 5, 69–95. Lavie, N., Lin, Z., Zokaei, N., & Thoma, V. (2009). The role of perceptual load in object recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 35, 1346. Lewkowicz, D. J. (1988a). Sensory dominance in infants: I. Six-month-old infants’ response to auditory-visual compounds. Developmental Psychology, 24, 155. Lewkowicz, D. J. (1988b). Sensory dominance in infants: II. Ten-monthold infants’ response to auditory-visual compounds. Developmental Psychology, 24, 172.
Mani, N., & Plunkett, K. (2010). In the infants minds ear evidence for implicit naming in 18-month-olds. Psychological science, 21, 908–913. Mani, N., & Plunkett, K. (2011). Phonological priming and cohort effects in toddlers. Cognition, 121, 196–206. Mareschal, D., & Quinn, P. C. (2001). Categorization in infancy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 443–450. Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Welsh, A. (1978). Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 29–63. Nava, E., & Pavani, F. (2013). Changes in sensory dominance during childhood: Converging evidence from the Colavita effect and the sound-induced ﬂash illusion. Child Development, 84, 604–616. Parise, E., & Csibra, G. (2012). Electrophysiological evidence for the understanding of maternal speech by 9-month-old infants. Psychological Science, p. 0956797612438734. Pereira, A., Smith, L., & Yu, C. (2013). A bottom-up view of toddler word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 1–8. Plunkett, K., Hu, J., & Cohen, L. (2008). Labels can override perceptual categories in early infancy. Cognition, 106, 665–681. Posner, M. I., Nissen, M. J., & Klein, R. M. (1976). Visual dominance: An information-processing account of its origins and signiﬁcance. Psychological Review, 83, 157–171. Quinn, P. C., Westerlund, A., & Nelson, C. (2006). Neural markers of categorization in 6-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 17, 59–66. Robinson, C. W., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2004). Auditory dominance and its change in the course of development. Child Development, 75, 1387–1401. Robinson, C. W., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2007a). Linguistic labels and categorization in infancy: Do labels facilitate or hinder? Infancy, 11, 233–253. Robinson, C. W., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2007b). Visual processing speed: Effects of auditory input on visual processing. Developmental Science, 10, 734–740. Sinnett, S., Spence, C., & Soto-Faraco, S. (2007). Visual dominance and attention: The Colavita effect revisited. Perception & Psychophysics, 69, 673–686. Sloutsky, V. M., Lo, Y. F., & Fisher, A. V. (2001). How much does a shared name make things similar? Linguistic labels, similarity, and the development of inductive inference. Child Development, 72, 1695–1709. Sloutsky, V. M., & Napolitano, A. C. (2003). Is a picture worth a thousand words? Preference for auditory modality in young children. Child Development, 74, 822–833. Sloutsky, V. M., & Robinson, C. W. (2008). The role of words and sounds in infants’ visual processing: From overshadowing to attentional tuning. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 32, 342–365. Strauss, M. S. (1979). Abstraction of prototypical information by adults and 10-month-old infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 618. Tomasello, M., & Farrar, M. J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development, 1454–1463. Tseng, P.-H., Carmi, R., Cameron, I. G., Munoz, D. P., & Itti, L. (2009). Quantifying center bias of observers in free viewing of dynamic natural scenes. Journal of Vision, 9, 4. Waxman, S., & Braun, I. (2005). Consistent (but not variable) names as invitations to form object categories: New evidence from 12-monthold infants. Cognition, 95, 59–68. Waxman, S., & Markow, D. (1995). Words as invitations to form categories: Evidence from 12- to 13-month-old infants. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 257–302. Whorf, B. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Report "Timing matters: The impact of label synchrony on infant categorisation"

References: V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V.