Lisa Oakes
University of California, Davis, Psychology, Faculty Member
- Developmental psychologist who studies infant cognition.edit
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Page 174. 6 How Infants Learn Categories LISA M. OAKES, JESSICA S. HORST, KRISTINE A. KOVACK-LESH, AND SAMMY PERONE, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA This chapter is about how infants learn categories. Clearly, infants are exception-ally good at... more
Page 174. 6 How Infants Learn Categories LISA M. OAKES, JESSICA S. HORST, KRISTINE A. KOVACK-LESH, AND SAMMY PERONE, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA This chapter is about how infants learn categories. Clearly, infants are exception-ally good at learning categories. ...
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ABSTRACT Because categorization is a real-time, dynamic process, infants' categorization and memory are intertwined. When familiarized with a series of items from one category and then tested with new items from that category and... more
ABSTRACT Because categorization is a real-time, dynamic process, infants' categorization and memory are intertwined. When familiarized with a series of items from one category and then tested with new items from that category and different categories, infants' memory processes are engaged, and their responding during test reveals what information they remembered. Moreover, what infants remember will be complexly determined by multiply interacting factors. We report data consistent with this framework. Experiment 1 revealed that, unlike in object-examining (Oakes, Coppage, & Dingel, 1997), within-category variability does not influence 10-monthold infants' responding to the distinction between land and sea animals in a visual familiarization task. Experiment 2 showed that although 6-month-old infants can respond to some categorical distinctions when items are presented one at a time (Oakes & Ribar, 2005), their sensitivity to the more difficult distinction of land animals versus sea animals was enhanced by presenting items in pairs. KEYWORDS: categorization, infants, memory, habituation. Remembering detailed information about every individual object we encounter would be impossible. Instead, we efficiently represent instances of chairs, cars, dogs, and coffee cups, by forming categories. This process may be especially important in infancy when a large number of new objects are encountered. Even very young infants have the cognitive building blocks to form categories. Newborns form memories, as indicated by habituation to a repeated stimulus and dishabituation to a new stimulus (Slater & Johnson, 1998). By 3 to 4 months infants detect commonalities among complex, multi-featured objects, such as those that define the category of cats (Oakes & Ribar, 2005; Quinn, Eimas, & Rosenkrantz, 1993; Younger & Fearing, 2000). During the first year, infants respond to categories as diverse as dogs, animals, vehicles, and furniture (see Mandler, 2004, for a review). The question, therefore, is not whether infants can categorize, but rather how they categorize. Here we describe our theoretical framework for understanding infants' categorization and then present new data consistent with this framework. We argue that infants form categories as they detect commonalities among items, by perceiving them, selectively attending and encoding some features, and comparing items. Thus, categories emerge from the interaction of multiple processes. As a result, categories are not stable and unchanging, but rather depend on factors that determine what features are perceived, attended, remembered, and compared. Here we focus on how memory influences infants' categorization. A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Infants' Categorization Often, concepts are referred to as mental representation of things - concepts are (in a sense) "in the head" and are not the same as the "real" objects (Murphy, 2002). One's concept of shoe, for example, is not the same as the category of real shoes that exist in the world. Traditionally, such representations are viewed as stable and symbolic (e.g., Mandler, 2004). Thus, researchers have aimed to document the categories infants "possess" at different points in development, and to explain changes in conceptual understanding that result in infants having some types of categories at one age and other types of categories at a later age. In contrast, we view categorization as a dynamic, real-time process. Categories are not static, but change as infants encounter new items (our view is similar to Smith's, 2005, dynamic systems view of cognition). Like Barsalou and his colleagues (e.g., Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003), we emphasize the mechanisms that produce conceptual understanding. The apparent static nature of concepts such as dog, shoe, and ball reflects similarities in the real-time processes engaged with each encounter with a concept rather than static, underlying representations. …
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This chapter explores the development of infants' attention to object function and how function is used by infants in categorizing objects. It proposes a developmental progression wherein infants attend first to the structural... more
This chapter explores the development of infants' attention to object function and how function is used by infants in categorizing objects. It proposes a developmental progression wherein infants attend first to the structural properties of objects, then to both structural and functional properties, and finally to the correlation between structural and functional properties. Data is presented showing that infants are capable of categorizing objects based on structural properties prior to categorizing based on functional properties, and that infants treat functional properties of objects as more central to category membership than structural properties. Finally, the chapter reviews findings that infants' attention to structure-function correlations is initially ‘atheoretical’ and only later conforms to the kinds correlations found in the real world. The ages at which any changes are observed will depend on how categorization is assessed and the kinds of objects that infants a...
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ABSTRACT� In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development,is best characterized as the � Humpty Dumpty problem� : Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the... more
ABSTRACT� In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development,is best characterized as the � Humpty Dumpty problem� : Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing cognitive system (and the infant) back together again? This problem is significant because cognitive abilities do not occur in isolation. Infants remember the items they have attended to and perceived, and their emotional state will influence their perception and representation of the events they encounter. Moreover, by examining the development of the whole cognitive system, or the whole child, we gain a deeper understanding of mechanisms developmental change. Thus, the big question for the study of infant cognition is like the question confronting all the king� s horses and all the king� s men: How do we put the infant� s cognitive system back together again? The � Humpty Dumpty� problem, page 3 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpt...
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In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development is best characterized as the “Humpty Dumpty problem”: Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing... more
In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development is best characterized as the “Humpty Dumpty problem”: Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing cognitive system (and the infant) back together again? This problem is significant because cognitive abilities do not occur in isolation. Infants remember the items they have attended to and perceived, and their emotional state will influence their perception and representation of the events they encounter. Moreover, by examining the development of the whole cognitive system, or the whole child, we gain a deeper understanding of mechanisms developmental change. Thus, the big question for the study of infant cognition is like the question confronting all the king's horses and all the king's men: How do we put the infant's cognitive system back together again?
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Perception, Auditory Perception, and 15 moreAttention, Child Clinical Psychology, Infant Cognition, Medicine, Motivation, Humans, Female, Male, Infant, Perception and Action, Developmental, Object Representation, Motor Skills, Objective function, and Psychomotor Performance
We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants... more
We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants without pet experience, both directing more visual attention to the informative head regions of the animals, particularly when comparing stimuli, and maintaining their attention to an individual animal, resisting the pull on their attention by the other visible animal. Individual differences in general attentional strategies as assessed during a pretest had similar but weaker relations to visual scanning patterns. There was some evidence that the 2 factors were interactively associated with visual inspection, supporting the findings of Kovack-Lesh and colleagues (Kovack-Lesh, Horst, & Oakes, 2008; Kovack-Lesh, Oakes, & McMurray, 2012) that infants' learning about and memory for this type of stimuli is jointly determined by pet experience and attentional style.
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1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid... more
1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi ...
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Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children (N=31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in... more
Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children (N=31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in how children and their parents play with spatial toys. We observed a large amount of variability in both children and parents’ behaviors, and in the puzzles they selected. Further, we found relations between parents’ and children’s behaviors. For example, parents provided more scaffolding behaviors for younger children and parents’ persistence-focused language was related to more child attempts after failure. Altogether, the present work shows how using methods of observing children at a distance, we can gain insight into the environment in which they are developing. The results are discussed in terms of how variability in spatial toys and spatial play during naturalistic interactions can help us contextualize the conclusions we draw from lab-based st...
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The binding of object identity (color) and location in visual short-term memory (VSTM) was examined in 6.5- to 12.5-month-old infants (N= 144). Although we previously found that by age 6.5 months, infants can represent both color and... more
The binding of object identity (color) and location in visual short-term memory (VSTM) was examined in 6.5- to 12.5-month-old infants (N= 144). Although we previously found that by age 6.5 months, infants can represent both color and location in VSTM, in the present study we observed that 6.5-month-old infants could not remember trivially simple color-location combinations across a 300-ms delay. However, 7.5-month-old infants could bind color and location as effectively as 12.5-month-old infants. Control conditions confirmed that the failure of 6.5-month-old infants was not a result of perceptual or attentional limitations. This rapid development of VSTM binding between 6.5 and 7.5 months occurs during a period of rapid increase in VSTM storage capacity and just after a period of dramatic neuroanatomical changes in parietal cortex. Thus, the ability to bind features and the ability to store multiple objects may both depend on a process that is mediated by posterior parietal cortex a...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive development, and 15 moreChild Development, Face recognition (Psychology), Categorization, Infant Cognition, Recognition memory, Medicine, Memory, Humans, Discrimination Learning, Female, Male, Infant, Visual Memory, Bf, and Neuropsychological Tests
We longitudinally investigated the development of endogenous control of attention in 2 types of tasks that involve competition for attentional focus at 7, 9, and 31 months of age. At all 3 sessions, children participated in a multiple... more
We longitudinally investigated the development of endogenous control of attention in 2 types of tasks that involve competition for attentional focus at 7, 9, and 31 months of age. At all 3 sessions, children participated in a multiple object free play task and a distractibility task. The results revealed both developmental differences and continuity of attentional skills. There was clear evidence of stability in distractibility between 9 and 31 months, and infant distractibility measures were related to toddler attention in the multiple object free play task. The results are discussed in terms of the development of endogenous control of attention and the underlying processes that may guide stability in attentional control.