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Updated: Jul 14, 2026
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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Hold your horses: how exposure to different items influences infant categorization
Kristine A Kovack-Lesh1, Lisa M Oakes
1Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|July 3, 2007
Summary
Infants learn categories better when shown different items, not identical ones. Comparing diverse objects helps 10-month-olds distinguish categories like horses and dogs.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Developmental Psychology
- Perception
Background:
- Infants' ability to form categories is crucial for cognitive development.
- Understanding how early experiences shape categorization is a key area in developmental psychology.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how exposure to different versus identical item pairs affects 10-month-old infants' categorization.
- To determine the role of item comparison in early categorization abilities.
Main Methods:
- Object-examining task with 79 ten-month-old infants.
- Familiarization with pairs of either identical or different items (horses vs. dogs).
- Controlled exposure frequency and retention intervals across experiments.
Main Results:
- Infants formed exclusive categories when familiarized with different item pairs, but not identical pairs.
- Memory for individual exemplars was not evident when infants were familiarized with identical pairs.
- Shortening the retention interval improved categorization for infants shown identical pairs.
Conclusions:
- Exposure to diverse items and opportunities for comparison enhance infants' categorization.
- The nature of item exposure (different vs. identical) significantly impacts early category formation.
- Infants' ability to form distinct categories is influenced by how items are presented and compared.
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