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The Role of Attention in the Development of Categorization

Deng, Wei
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433508672

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Psychology.
Categorization is a critically important aspect of cognition: it enables recognition and differentiation of objects, people, and events, organizes our existing knowledge, and promotes generalization in new situations. Although this ability appears early in development and it has important ramifications for the acquisition of other cognitive capacities, many questions regarding the development of categorization remain unanswered. How do people learn and represent categories? How does the way categories are learned affect the ways categories are represented? And how do category representations change in the course of development and learning? The current project, consisting of six experiments, attempted to answer these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of category learning and category representation. First, in Experiment 1, 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were trained with either a classification task or an inference task and their categorization performance and memory for items were tested. Adults and 6-year-olds exhibited an important asymmetry: they relied on a single deterministic (D) feature during classification training, but not during inference training. In contrast, regardless of the learning regime, 4-year-olds relied on multiple probabilistic (P) features. Second, in Experiments 2-4, 4-year-olds and adults were trained with a classification task and their attention was attracted to the D feature (Experiment 3) or P features (Experiment 4). There was also a baseline (Experiment 2), where no attention manipulation was introduced. There was an important dissociation between categorization and recognition memory. In terms of categorization responses, children and adults were responsive to manipulations. However, important differences transpired with respect to category representation, as evidenced by recognition memory. Adults, unless told otherwise in Experiment 4, tended to extract the D feature and form a rule-based representation. In contrast, regardless of their categorization performance, young children tended to encode multi-feature information and form a similarity-based representation. These results point to an important developmental difference in the pattern of attention: Whereas adults attend selectively to what they deem to be category-relevant, young children attend diffusely. Importantly, more efficient selective attention in adults was accompanied by worse memory of the to-be-ignored features than of the to-be-attended features, whereas less efficient diffused attention in children was accompanied by equally good memory of both to-be-attended and to-be-ignored features. Finally, Experiments 5-6 further examined the role of attention in categorization by focusing on the role of words and dynamic visual features in category learning in 8- to 12- month infants. Infants were familiarized with exemplars from one category in a label-defined or motion-defined condition and then tested with prototypes from the studied category and from a novel contrast category. Eye tracking results indicated that infants exhibited better category learning in the motion-defined than in the label-defined condition and their attention was more distributed among different features when there was a dynamic visual feature compared to the label-defined condition. These results are discussed in relation to theories of categorization, the role of selective attention, and the role of linguistic labels in the development of category learning.
Vladimir Sloutsky (Advisor)
John Opfer (Committee Member)
Stephen Petrill (Committee Member)
147 p.
Psychology
Psychology, Cognitive Development, Categorization, Attention

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Deng, W. (2015). The Role of Attention in the Development of Categorization [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433508672

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Deng, Wei. The Role of Attention in the Development of Categorization. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433508672.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Deng, Wei. "The Role of Attention in the Development of Categorization." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433508672

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1433508672
409
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.