Tracking Cognitive Development through infants’ eyes
Caroline Junge & Maartje Raijmakers (e-mail: c.m.m.junge@uva.nl)
Half-year projects; starting date Nov-Mar 2014; not full-time necessary; Pref. Dutch, pref.
with eye-tracking experience.
Location: babylab (www.hoelerenbabies.nl)
Projects:
1. Visual categorization: based on distributional learning? (1-2 ResMa-students)
Infants can track frequencies of tokens (distributional learning) such that based on its
distribution they either construct one (unimodal distribution; mainly mid-points of the
continuum) or two categories (bimodal distribution; mainly both end-points of the
continuum). This works for the auditory domain (Maye et al., 2002), but does it also hold for
a different modality, i.e. visual categorization? For this purpose we created an 8-step
continuum of two objects (see above). Two groups of 8-month-olds will see either a
unimodal or a bimodal distribution of a continuum of objects.
Internship 1.1: To test whether infants build either 1 or 2 categories depending on the
frequency of presentations, we use a test commonly used in visual categorization: pairedpictures (Gliozzi et al., 2009). We predict that infants in the bimodal distribution should show
a novelty preference for the mid-exemplar, whereas infants in the unimodal distribution
should show no preference.
Internship 1.2: If infants in the bimodal condition construct two categories, they should
gradually pay more attention to the distinguishing features. In this internship you will
examine the development of scanning patterns in the familiarization phase.
Literature: Maye, Werker & Gerken, Cognition, 2002;
Gliozzi, V., Mayor, J., Hu, J. F., & Plunkett, K. (2009). Labels as features (not names) for
infant categorization: A neurocomputational approach. Cognitive science, 33(4), 709-738.
Project 2: Cross-situational associative learning
How infants learn novel words in a laboratory setting has mainly been studied in a very
simplified way: one object on the screen accompanied by one word. However, the world is
much more complex. There are more objects, and more possible word candidates that match
onto these words. Yu & Smith (2008, 2010) developed an associative word-learning
paradigm, in which infants always see two novel objects, and they need to track which
objects co-occur with which words. However, words were presented as single words, whereas
parents are more likely to teach words in a sentence context. In this study we compare
whether infants can learn words taught this way equally well.
Example of stimuli:
1. ‘Look there’s a foenie and
there’s a pola. 2. Hey, there is the
foenie again, with the kemer.
Project 3
Go/noGo paradigm: reward?
There is limited success in using anticipation measures in infant categorization tasks. One
paradigm is the occlude-task: one object appears, goes behind an occluder, and reappears
either to the left or right, depending on its shape. While the object is behind the occluder, the
infant could anticipate its appearance (either left
, or right
). In such a study the
reappearance is the reward for the child (McMurray & Aslin, 2008). After a certain number
of correct anticipations, test phase started, in which a slightly altered object (colour_left, or
shape_right
) was presented, and the dependent measure was to which side the child
anticipated the object to reappear. However, replication proved difficult. Here we would like
to examine whether timing of rewards influence success. Timing could be dependent on first
fixation (correct, then reward reappears immediately; incorrect then reward appears delayed,
or not at all), or even wait until fixation is correct.
Further reading: McMurray & Aslin, 2008; Shukla & Aslin, 2011; Mandell & Raijmakers,
2011