Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Partitioning the world into meaningful categories is a challenging task, especially considering the vast amount of information that could be recruited in the process (Cohen & Lefebvre, 2017). The early emergence of categorization skills allows children to make sense of the vast diversity of objects and entities in their environment. In particular, to categorize a given entity as being either animate or inanimate is thought to be a fundamental process characterizing human perception and cognition (e.g. Opfer & Gelman, 2010). In order to form such categories, children must perceive entities as alike, that is, employ some type of similarity rule to group them together. How do infants successfully organize the world into meaningful categories? In recent years, tremendous strides have been made toward investigating the conditions under which infants form categories, as well as the types of information that they consider in doing so (see Pauen, Birgit, Hoehl, & Bechtel, 2015 and Poulin-Dubois & Pauen, 2017 for recent reviews). Using research procedures that are appropriate for preverbal infants, it has been found that infants discriminate global categories like animals, vehicles, and furniture earlier in life than more fine-grained basic-level categories within each global class, such as cats and dogs, chairs and tables, or cars and trucks (Pauen, 2002). Since discovering this shift, researchers have been trying to understand the mental processes underlying category discrimination at a preverbal age, thereby focusing on whether infants develop knowledge-based representations for categories before language comes into play (Poulin-Dubois & Pauen, 2017). However, little is known about the mechanisms that allow children to focus their attention on what is most relevant to categorization. How do infants determine which objects to compare to each other? How do they determine which properties of those objects to focus on? Which motion cues are first associated to animate beings? Is biological motion a privileged cue for such distinction? Finally, how does the emergence of language promote categorization of objects at less-inclusive level, such as the basic level? Regarding the last issue, labels are considered to boost object categorization by allowing infants to focus on commonalities (Ferguson & Waxman, 2017). When the same noun is applied consistently to a set of distinct objects, both infants and adults alike are more likely to represent them as members of the same object category (Keates & Graham, 2008; Lupyan, Rakison & McClelland, 2007; Waxman & Booth, 2001; 2003). However, the exact function of labelling is unclear as well as whether bilingual children benefit as much from language when forming categories given their strategy to map more than one word to an object. The series of studies to be conducted in the context of the current research program attempts to fill these gaps.*