Words and arbitrary actions in early object categorization: weak evidence for a word advantage
2024-02-21 | journal article. A publication with affiliation to the University of Göttingen.
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Words and arbitrary actions in early object categorization: weak evidence for a word advantage
Bothe, R.; Trouillet, L.; Elsner, B. & Mani, N. (2024)
Royal Society Open Science, 11(2) art. 230648. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230648
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- Authors
- Bothe, Ricarda; Trouillet, Léonie; Elsner, Birgit; Mani, Nivedita
- Abstract
- Both words and gestures have been shown to influence object categorization, often even overriding perceptual similarities to cue category membership. However, gestures are often meaningful to infants while words are arbitrarily related to an object they refer to, more similar to arbitrary actions that can be performed on objects. In this study, we examine how words and arbitrary actions shape category formation. Across three conditions (word cue, action cue, word-action cue), we presented infants (N = 90) with eight videos of single-category objects which vary in colour and other perceptual features. The objects were either accompanied by a word and/or an action that is being performed on the object. Infants in the word and action condition showed a decrease in looking over the course of the familiarization phase indicating habituation to the category, but infants in the word-action condition did not. At test, infants saw a novel object of the just-learned category and a novel object from another category side-by-side on the screen. There was some evidence for an advantage for words in shaping early object categorization, although we note that this was not robust across analyses.
- Issue Date
- 21-February-2024
- Journal
- Royal Society Open Science
- Project
- SFB 1528: Kognition der Interaktion
- Organization
- Georg-August-Universität Göttingen ; Georg-Elias-Müller Institut für Psychologie
- ISSN
- 2054-5703
- Language
- English