2018 Friday Session B 1100

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 11am

The power of a name: Labeling changes infants’ memory for individual objects
A. LaTourrette, S. Waxman

Even before infants speak their first words, the words they hear exert a powerful influence over their cognition. Within the first year of life, infants link nouns specifically to object categories. When the same noun is applied consistently to distinct objects, infants show an enhanced ability to form an overarching category that includes all of them (Waxman & Markow, 1995). Conversely, when different nouns are applied to distinct objects, infants expect the objects to be from different kinds (Dewar & Xu, 2009) and struggle to identify a common category (Plunkett et al., 2008; Waxman & Braun, 2005).

Here, we ask how naming exerts this effect. Specifically, we propose that hearing the same label applied consistently to a set of objects facilitates categorization by focusing infants’ attention to commonalities among them (Althaus & Plunkett, 2015; Waxman & Markow, 1995). On the other hand, hearing distinct labels for distinct objects should highlight differences among the objects, promoting attention to each object’s unique features and interfering with the identification of an overarching category. This proposal yields a new, testable hypothesis: when objects are consistently paired with the same noun, infants’ success in forming an inclusive category should come at the expense of their ability to discriminate the individual objects. In contrast, when the same objects are labeled with distinct nouns, infants should successfully discriminate the labeled individuals.

To test this prediction, we developed a memory task. During the learning phase, we exposed 12- month-old infants to four animal images (Figure 1). Infants were randomly assigned to either the Consistent Label (same novel noun applied to all exemplars) or the Variable Label (a different noun applied to each exemplar) condition. We then assessed infants’ memory for these exemplars in a silent test phase. On each of four test trials, we paired an animal from the learning phase with a novel animal. If infants remember the individual exemplars they viewed during learning, then they should prefer to look at the novel exemplars.

The results support this prediction (Figure 2). Infants in the Variable Label condition (n=18/24) displayed significant novelty preferences on three of four test trials (ps<.05). In contrast, providing a common label had a different effect: Infants in the Consistent Label condition (n=17/24) showed no evidence of remembering any of the individual animals, ps>.2.

These results provide new insight into previous findings concerning naming’s influence on object categorization. When objects are given unique labels, infants attend to their unique features— enhancing their ability to recall these objects later (for converging evidence from different paradigms, see(Feigenson & Halberda, 2008; Scott, 2011). However, when objects are given a common label, infants focus on their shared features, facilitating the abstraction of an inclusive category but interfering with memory for each distinct individual. Indeed, on the first test trial, infants in the Consistent Label condition show impaired memory for an individual they saw mere moments before, in the final learning trial. Thus, from an early age, language encourages infants to allocate their attention in sophisticated, adaptive ways.

References

Althaus, N., & Plunkett, K. (2015). Categorization in infancy: Labeling induces a persisting focus on commonalities. Developmental Science, 770–780.

Dewar, K., & Xu, F. (2009). Do early nouns refer to kinds or distinct shapes? Evidence from 10-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 20(2), 252–257.

Feigenson, L., & Halberda, J. (2008). Conceptual knowledge increases infants’ memory capacity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(29), 9926–9930.

Plunkett, K., Hu, J.-F., & Cohen, L. B. (2008). Labels can override perceptual categories in early infancy. Cognition, 106(2), 665–681.

Scott, L. S. (2011). Mechanisms Underlying the Emergence of Object Representations during Infancy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(10), 2935–2944.

Waxman, S., & Braun, I. (2005). Consistent (but not variable) names as invitations to form object categories: New evidence from 12-month-old infants. Cognition, 95(3), B59-68.

Waxman, S. R., & Markow, D. B. (1995). Words as invitations to form categories: evidence from 12- to 13-month- old infants. Cognitive Psychology, 29(3), 257–302.