The ability to generalize previous knowledge to new contexts is a key aspect of human cognition and relational learning. A well-known learning maxim is that breadth of training predicts "breadth of transfer." When examples vary in their surface features, this provides evidence that only the common relational structure is relevant.…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to…

From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II "linguistic" patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages…

We examined how infants' categorization is jointly influenced by previous experience and how much they shift their gaze back and forth between stimuli. Extending previous findings reported by K. A. Kovack-Lesh, J. S. Horst, and L. M. Oakes (2008), we found that 4-month-old infants' (N = 122) learning of the exclusive category of "cats" was related…

Six-month-old infants' ("N" = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats) was examined to investigate the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with six different cats or dogs, presented one at a time…

Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…

This study used event-related potentials (ERP) and visual preference technique to assess 6-month olds' ability to recognize their mothers' face. Results of five experiments suggested that infants can recognize their mothers' face, but the neural processes accompanying recognition depend on the difficulty with which mothers can be discriminated…