Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning.

Category learning is a crucial aspect of cognition that involves organizing entities into equivalence classes. Whereas adults tend to focus on category-relevant features, young children often distribute attention between relevant and irrelevant ones. The reasons for children's distributed attention are not fully understood.

"The eyes are the window to the representation": Linking gaze to memory precision and decision weights in object discrimination tasks.

Humans selectively attend to task-relevant information in order to make accurate decisions. However, selective attention incurs consequences if the learning environment changes unexpectedly. This trade-off has been underscored by studies that compare learning behaviors between adults and young children: broad sampling during learning comes with a breadth of information in memory, often allowing children to notice details of the environment that are missed by their more selective adult counterparts.

The Role of Attention in Category Representation.

Numerous studies have found that selective attention affects category learning. However, previous research did not distinguish between the contribution of focusing and filtering components of selective attention. This study addresses this issue by examining how components of selective attention affect category representation.

When is a word in good company for learning?

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's real-world language input have yielded conflicting results, with some influential findings suggesting an advantage for words that keep a diverse company of other words, and others suggesting the opposite. Here, we sought to triangulate the source of this conflict, comparing different measures of diversity and approaches to controlling for correlated effects of word frequency across multiple languages.

The development of visual cognition: The emergence of spatial congruency bias.

In adults, spatial location plays a special role in visual object processing. People are more likely to judge two sequentially presented objects as being identical when they appear in the same location compared to in different locations (a phenomenon referred to as Spatial Congruency Bias [SCB]). However, no comparable Identity Congruency Bias (ICB) is found, suggesting an asymmetric location-identity relationship in object binding.

Exploration, exploitation, and development: Developmental shifts in decision-making.

Decision-making requires balancing exploration with exploitation, yet children are highly exploratory, with exploration decreasing with development. Less is known about what drives these changes. We examined the development of decision-making in 188 three- to eight-year-old children (M = 64 months; 98 girls) and 26 adults (M = 19 years; 13 women).

From features to categories: The development of inductive generalization.

Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new evidence to the debate.

Cognition: The power of simple associative learning.

Associative learning is traditionally considered to be slow and inefficient compared to 'smarter' rule-based learning. New research reveals the remarkable ability of associative learning in acquiring exceedingly complex categories.

No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development.

The quest for simplicity in human learning: Identifying the constraints on attention.

For better or worse, humans live a resource-constrained existence; only a fraction of physical sensations ever reach conscious awareness, and we store a shockingly small subset of these experiences in memory for later use. Here, we examined the effects of attention constraints on learning. Among models that frame selective attention as an optimization problem, attention orients toward information that will reduce errors.

The benefits of immature cognitive control: How distributed attention guards against learning traps.

Cognitive control allows one to focus one's attention efficiently on relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This ability provides a means of rapid and effective learning, but using this control also brings risks. Importantly, useful information may be ignored and missed, and learners may fall into "learning traps" (e.

Category learning is shaped by the multifaceted development of selective attention.

Categories are a fundamental building block of cognition that simplify the multitude of entities we encounter into equivalence classes. By simplifying this barrage of inputs, categories support reasoning about and interacting with their members. For example, despite differences in size, color, and other features, we can treat members of the category of dogs as equivalent, and thus generalize information about any given dog to other dogs.

Experience and maturation: The contribution of co-occurrence regularities in language to the development of semantic organization.

With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early-developing associative (e.g., juicy-apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.

As within, so without, as above, so below: Common mechanisms can support between- and within-trial category learning dynamics.

Two fundamental difficulties when learning novel categories are deciding (a) what information is relevant and (b) when to use that information. Although previous theories have specified how observers learn to attend to relevant dimensions over time, those theories have largely remained silent about how attention should be allocated on a within-trial basis, which dimensions of information should be sampled, and how the temporal order of information sampling influences learning. Here, we use the adaptive attention representation model (AARM) to demonstrate that a common set of mechanisms can be used to specify: (a) How the distribution of attention is updated between trials over the course of learning and (b) how attention dynamically shifts among dimensions within a trial.

Sources of Interference in Memory Across Development.

Episodic memory involves remembering not only what happened but also where and when the event happened. This multicomponent nature introduces different sources of interference that stem from previous experience. However, it is unclear how the contributions of these sources change across development and what might cause the changes.

Ready to Learn: Incidental Exposure Fosters Category Learning.

Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teaching.

Exposure to co-occurrence regularities in language drives semantic integration of new words.

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between and . These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become integrated into our semantic networks? Here, we investigated whether humans integrate new words by harnessing simple statistical regularities of word use in language, including: (a) Direct co-occurrence (e.

Intraobject and extraobject memory binding across early development.

The ability to bind, or link, different aspects of an experience in memory undergoes protracted development across childhood. Most studies of memory binding development have assessed extraobject binding between an object and some external element such as another object, whereas little work has examined the development of intraobject binding, such as between shape and color features within the same object. In this work, we investigate the development of intra- and extraobject memory binding in five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, and young adults with a memory interference paradigm.

Not all exceptions are created equal: Learning of exceptions in pigeons' categorization.

Learning of exceptions - those items that violate a known regularity - takes longer than learning of rule-following items. Studies reporting this disparity have used exceptions that share most of their features with members of the opposite category (crossover exceptions). Yet, exceptions can be distinctly different from members of their own category and other categories as well (oddball exceptions).

The Development of Attention to Objects and Scenes: From Object-Biased to Unbiased.

Selective attention is the ability to focus on goal-relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This work examined the development of selective attention to natural scenes and objects with a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Children (N = 69, ages 4-6 years) and adults (N = 80) were asked to attend to either objects or scenes, while ignoring the other type of stimulus.

Systematic exploration and uncertainty dominate young children's choices.

Organisms need to constantly balance the competing demands of gathering information and using previously acquired information to obtain rewarding outcomes (i.e., the "exploration-exploitation" dilemma).

Selective and distributed attention in human and pigeon category learning.

Attention to relevant stimulus features in a categorization task helps to optimize performance. However, the relationship between attention and categorization is not fully understood. For example, even when human adults and young children exhibit comparable categorization behavior, adults tend to attend selectively during learning, whereas young children tend to attend diffusely (Deng & Sloutsky, 2016).

Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children.

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularly valuable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision-making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children.

Statistical regularities shape semantic organization throughout development.

Our knowledge about the world is represented not merely as a collection of concepts, but as an organized lexico-semantic network in which concepts can be linked by relations, such as "taxonomic" relations between members of the same stable category (e.g., cat and sheep), or association between entities that occur together or in the same context (e.

Examining three-way binding as a constraint on statistical learning.

Models of statistical learning do not place constraints on the complexity of the memory structure that is formed during statistical learning, while empirical studies using the statistical learning task have only examined the formation of simple memory structures (e.g., two-way binding).