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Information enters the brain through encoding, which is the input of information into the memory system. Once sensory information is received from the environment, the brain labels or codes it. The information is then organized with similar information and connected to existing concepts. Encoding occurs through automatic processing and effortful processing.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 22, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

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

Communicative Efficiency or Iconic Learning: Do Acquisition and Communicative Pressures Interact to Shape Colour-

Balint Gyevnar¹, Gautier Dagan¹, Coleman Haley¹

¹School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK.

Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)

|November 11, 2022

Summary

Language evolution is shaped by learning and communication. When language is iconic, learning alone can drive evolution, balancing simplicity and informativity in color naming.

Keywords:

colour-naming systems communicative efficiency information bottleneck language evolution

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Last Updated: Aug 22, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

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Published on: April 19, 2017

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Published on: April 24, 2017

Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Evolutionary Biology

Background:

Language evolution is influenced by competing pressures for simplicity and informativity.
The relative contributions of language acquisition (learning) versus language use (communication) to these pressures are debated.
Existing models focus on either learning biases or communicative efficiency, but not their interplay.

Purpose of the Study:

To formally define and investigate the communicative efficiency of language acquisition trajectories.
To determine the extent to which language evolves during acquisition versus use.
To model the trade-offs between simplicity and informativity in language, using color-naming systems as a case study.

Main Methods:

Formal definition and investigation of communicative efficiency in acquisition trajectories.
Replication of the communicative efficiency model by Zaslavsky et al. (2018).
Replication of the acquisition model by Beekhuizen & Stevenson (2018).

Main Results:

Learning biases alone are sufficient to shape language evolution, particularly when language is iconic.
Incorporating learning biases into communicative efficiency models can explain the speaker-listener trade-off between effort and information.
Analysis of color-naming systems demonstrates how learning and use interact to optimize communication.

Conclusions:

Language evolution is a dynamic process influenced by both learning and use.
Iconicity plays a crucial role in enabling learning to drive language evolution.
A unified framework considering both acquisition and use is necessary to fully understand language evolution and optimization.