Word, thought, and deed: The role of object categories in children's inductive inferences and exploratory play.

Previous research (e.g., S. A. Gelman & E. M. Markman, 1986; A. Gopnik & D. M. Sobel, 2000) suggests that children can use category labels to make inductive inferences about nonobvious causal properties of objects. However, such inductive generalizations can fail to predict objects' causal properties when (a) the property being projected varies within the category, (b) the category is arbitrary (e.g., things smaller than a bread box), or (c) the property being projected is due to an exogenous intervention rather than intrinsic to the object kind. In 4 studies, the authors showed that preschoolers (M = 48 months; range = 42-57 months) were sensitive to these constraints on induction and selectively engaged in exploration when evidence about objects' causal properties conflicted with inductive generalizations from the objects' kind to their causal powers. This suggests that the exploratory actions children generate in free play could support causal learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing of logically valid and logically invalid conditional inferences in discourse comprehension.

Two competing theories of processing of conditionals (if-then) were tested. Syntactic theories posit that people only draw inferences conforming to the logically valid modus ponens (MP) schema. Mental models theories predict that people draw MP and invalid affirming-the-consequent (AC) inferences. Three experiments tested these predictions. Participants read short stories that conformed to either the MP or AC form but without conclusions, and they completed either priming or recognition tasks. Results indicate that both MP and AC inferences occur during discourse processing: MP and AC premise forms prime their respective conclusions, participants erroneously judged that they had read the conclusions to MP and AC arguments, and AC inferences did not stem from a biconditional interpretation of conditionals. Findings support mental models theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words.

Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the similar actions. In Experiment 2, 3 new pairs of labels (2 similar, 1 dissimilar) were taught to children in the same age range. Eye gaze and gestures were the main features distinguishing the similar events. The same developmental effect was observed, with only the older children showing learning of both types of verbs and the younger children being impeded by the appearance of the actions. The results show that by the middle of the 2nd year, children begin to consider intentions-in-action when acquiring the meaning of novel action verbs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perspectives of probabilistic inferences: Reinforcement learning and an adaptive network compared.

The assumption that people possess a strategy repertoire for inferences has been raised repeatedly. The strategy selection learning theory specifies how people select strategies from this repertoire. The theory assumes that individuals select strategies proportional to their subjective expectations of how well the strategies solve particular problems; such expectations are assumed to be updated by reinforcement learning. The theory is compared with an adaptive network model that assumes people make inferences by integrating information according to a connectionist network. The network's weights are modified by error correction learning. The theories were tested against each other in 2 experimental studies. Study 1 showed that people substantially improved their inferences through feedback, which was appropriately predicted by the strategy selection learning theory. Study 2 examined a dynamic environment in which the strategies' performances changed. In this situation a quick adaptation to the new situation was not observed; rather, individuals got stuck on the strategy they had successfully applied previously. This "inertia effect" was most strongly predicted by the strategy selection learning theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generic language and speaker confidence guide preschoolers’ inferences about novel animate kinds.

We investigated the influence of speaker certainty on 156 four-year-old children’s sensitivity to generic and nongeneric statements. An inductive inference task was implemented, in which a speaker described a nonobvious property of a novel creature using either a generic or a nongeneric statement. The speaker appeared to be confident, neutral, or uncertain about the information being relayed. Preschoolers were subsequently asked if a second exemplar shared the same property as the first. Preschoolers consistently extended properties to additional exemplars only when properties were described in a generic form by a confident or neutral speaker. If a speaker appeared to be uncertain or if statements were made in a nongeneric form, properties were not consistently extended beyond the first exemplar. The findings demonstrate that children integrate the inductive cues provided by generic language with social cues when reasoning about abstract kinds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children associate novel words with complex objects rather than salient parts.

How do children learn associations between novel words and complex perceptual displays? Using a visual preference procedure, the authors tested 12- and 19-month-olds to see whether the infants would associate a novel word with a complex 2-part object or with either of that object's parts, both of which were potentially objects in their own right and 1 of which was highly salient to infants. At both ages, children's visual fixation times during test were greater to the entire complex object than to the salient part (Experiment 1) or to the less salient part (Experiment 2)--when the original label was requested. Looking times to the objects were equal if a new label was requested or if neutral audio was used during training (Experiment 3). Thus, from 12 months of age, infants associate words with whole objects, even those that could potentially be construed as 2 separate objects and even if 1 of the parts is salient. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychometric inferences from a meta-analysis of reliability and internal consistency coefficients.

A meta-analysis of the reliability of the scores from a specific test, also called reliability generalization, allows the quantitative synthesis of its properties from a set of studies. It is usually assumed that part of the variation in the reliability coefficients is due to some unknown and implicit mechanism that restricts and biases the selection of participants in the studies' samples. Sometimes this variation has been reduced by adjusting the coefficients by a formula associated with range restrictions. We propose a framework in which that variation is included (instead of adjusted) in the models intended to explain the variability and in which parallel analyses of the studies' means and variances are performed. Furthermore, the analysis of the residuals enables inferences to be made about the nature of the variability accounted for by moderator variables. The meta-analysis of the 3 studies' statistics—reliability coefficient, mean, and variance—allows psychometric inferences about the test scores. A numerical example illustrates the proposed framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching adults new words: The role of practice and consolidation.

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word compared with a nonword (a general PWI effect). This interference is taken to reflect automatic orthographic and semantic processing. The authors observed that participants showed both types of PWI effects for newly learned words following a single study session. Interestingly, specific PWI effects were not obtained immediately after testing but did emerge a week later without additional practice. This suggests that a period of consolidation is involved in the establishment of word representations. In addition, identical PWI effects were obtained when the study and test words were presented in either the same or different letter case. This provides evidence that the newly acquired orthographic representations are coded in an abstract format. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's gender-related inferences and judgments: A cross-cultural study.

This study compared the gender-related inferences and judgments of elementary school children (N?=?542) of 2 different age groups (3rd graders and 5th graders) from 2 different cultures: Taiwan, a traditional collectivistic culture, and Israel, an individualistic and less traditional culture. The children were presented with 4 stories, 2 about a male target and 2 about a female target with either traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine interests, and were asked to make cognitive and emotional-motivational inferences and judgments about them. Culture played an important role in children's gender-related inferences and judgments. Specifically, Taiwanese children distinguished more than did Israeli children between male targets behaving stereotypically and counterstereotypically. The findings are analyzed within the framework of the differences between the 2 cultures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sensitivity of 24-month-olds to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms.

Three studies examined 24-month-olds' sensitivity to the prior accuracy of the source of information and the way in which young children modify their word learning from inaccurate sources. In Experiments 1A, 2, and 3, toddlers interacted with an accurate or inaccurate speaker who trained and tested children's comprehension of a new word–object link. In Experiment 1, children performed less systematically in response to an inaccurate than to an accurate source. In Experiments 2 and 3, after toddlers' comprehension of the new word–object links was tested by the original source, a second speaker requested the target objects. In Experiment 2, children responded randomly in response to the second speaker's requests when novel words were previously presented by an inaccurate source. In Experiment 3, toddlers responded randomly in response to both speakers in the inaccurate condition when their memory for words was taxed by a brief delay period. Taken together, these findings suggest that toddlers attend to accuracy information, that they treat inaccuracy as a feature of a particular individual, and that the word–object representations formed as a result may be fragile and short lived. Findings are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms by which children adjust their word learning from problematic speakers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infants’ learning of novel words in a stochastic environment.

In everyday word learning words are only sometimes heard in the presence of their referent, making the acquisition of novel words a particularly challenging task. The current study investigated whether children (18-month-olds who are novice word learners) can track the statistics of co-occurrence between words and objects to learn novel mappings in a stochastic environment. Infants were briefly trained on novel word–novel object pairs with variable degrees of co-occurrence: Words were either paired reliably with 1 referent or stochastically paired with 2 different referents with varying probabilities. Infants were sensitive to the co-occurrence statistics between words and referents, tracking not just the strongest available contingency but also low-frequency information. The statistical strength of the word–referent mapping may also modulate real-time online lexical processing in infants. Infants are thus able to track stochastic relationships between words and referents in the process of learning novel words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of categorization and reasoning in the natural world: Novices to experts, naive similarity to ecological knowledge.

Two experiments investigate the role of similarity and causal-ecological knowledge in expert and novice categorization and reasoning. In Experiment 1, university undergraduates and commercial fishermen sorted marine creatures into groups; although there was substantial agreement, novices sorted largely on the basis of appearance, whereas experts often cited commercial, ecological, or behavioral factors, and systematically subdivided fish on the basis of ecological niche. In Experiment 2, experts and novices were asked to generalize a blank property or novel disease from a pair of marine creatures. Novices relied on similarity to guide generalizations. Experts used similarity to reason about blank properties but ecological relations to reason about diseases. Expertise appears to involve knowledge of multiple relations among entities and context-sensitive application of those relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extending the simultaneous-sequential paradigm to measure perceptual capacity for features and words.

In perception, divided attention refers to conditions in which multiple stimuli are relevant to an observer. To measure the effect of divided attention in terms of perceptual capacity, we introduce an extension of the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. The extension makes predictions for fixed-capacity models as well as for unlimited-capacity models. We apply this paradigm to two example tasks, contrast discrimination and word categorization, and find dramatically different effects of divided attention. Contrast discrimination has unlimited capacity, consistent with independent, parallel processing. Word categorization has a nearly fixed capacity, consistent with either serial processing or fixed-capacity, parallel processing. We argue that these measures of perceptual capacity rely on relatively few assumptions compared to most alternative measures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The perception of assimilation in newly learned novel words.

The present study investigated the mechanisms underlying perceptual compensation for assimilation in novel words. During training, participants learned canonical versions of novel spoken words (e.g., decibot) presented in isolation. Following exposure to a second set of novel words the next day, participants carried out a phoneme monitoring task. Here, the novel words were presented with final alternations (e.g., decibop) in carrier sentences that either licensed assimilation (viable context: Our decibop behaved badly) or did not (unviable context: Our decibop does very well). Listeners had to monitor for the underlying form of the assimilated consonant (e.g., /t/ in decibop). Results showed more responses corresponding to the underlying form in viable than in unviable contexts. This viability effect was equivalent for novel words learned on the same day and on the previous day but was absent for unexposed control items. The processing difference between exposed and control novel words supports the idea that compensation for assimilation interacts with newly acquired phonological information and suggests that contextual compensation for assimilation is enhanced by lexical knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spontaneous trait inferences and organisational actions: The formation of organisation personality perceptions.

Organisation personality perceptions, or the attribution of human personality characteristics to an organisation, have been found to affect organisational attraction, job pursuit intentions, and organisational reputation. Although the presence and potency of these attributions have been established, little is known about the manner in which these attributions come about, particularly whether the process is consistent with personality attributions made about human targets. In the current paper, we extend previous work by investigating the underlying social–cognitive mechanism by which organisation personality perceptions are formed. Specifically, we tested the proposition that organisation personality perceptions are spontaneously inferred in a manner that is functionally isomorphic with individual personality perceptions. Study 1 used a cued-recall paradigm, with results indicating that implied trait words improved recall for both individual and organisational actors. Study 2 extended these findings using a lexical decision paradigm; results showed improved performance when making a lexical decision about trait words regardless of whether the actor in a behaviour presented just prior was an individual or an organisation. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond fast mapping: Young children's extensions of novel words and novel facts.

L. Markson and P. Bloom (1997) concluded that there was evidence against a dedicated system for word learning on the basis of their finding that children remembered a novel word and a novel fact equally well. However, a word-learning system involves more than recognition memory; it must also provide a means to guide the extension of words to additional exemplars, and words and facts may differ with regard to extendibility. Two studies are reported in which 2–4-year-old children learned novel words and novel facts for unfamiliar objects and then were asked to extend the words and facts to additional exemplars of the training objects. In both studies, children extended the novel word to significantly more category members than they extended the novel fact. The results show that by 2 years of age, children honor the necessary extendibility of novel count nouns but are uncertain about the extendibility of arbitrary facts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When stereotypes get in the way: Stereotypes obstruct stereotype-inconsistent trait inferences.

There is a growing body of evidence indicating that people spontaneously make trait inferences while observing the behavior of others. The present article reports a series of 5 experiments that examined the influence of stereotypes on the spontaneous inference of traits. Results consistently showed weaker spontaneous trait inferences for stereotype-inconsistent behavioral information than for stereotype-consistent and stereotype-neutral information. Taken together, the current results suggest that specific spontaneous trait inferences become obstructed by inhibitory processes when behavior is inconsistent with an already activated stereotype. These findings are discussed in relation to stereotype maintenance processes and recent models of attribution in social judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Narrative comprehension in Alzheimer's disease: Assessing inferences and memory operations with a think-aloud procedure.

Objective: To further understanding of text comprehension abilities in Alzheimer's disease (AD), a think-aloud protocol was used to examine the role of inferencing and the memory operations used to produce inferences. Method: Twenty participants with AD and 20 cognitively healthy older adults (OA) read narratives, pausing to talk aloud after each sentence. A verbal protocol analysis developed by Trabasso and Magliano (1996a) was used to code participants' utterances into inferential and noninferential clause types; inferential statements were then coded to identify the memory operation used in their generation. Results: Compared with OA controls, the AD participants showed poorer story comprehension, d = 2.0, produced fewer inferences, d = .67, and were less skilled at providing explanations of story events, d = 1.27, and in using prior text information to explain outcomes, d = .90. The AD group also appeared to rely more on the activation of world knowledge, d = .58, which contributed to less effective inferences and produced more incoherent noninferential statements, d = 1.05. Poorer text comprehension for the AD group was associated with poorer verbal memory abilities, r's > .55, and poorer use of prior text events when producing explanatory inferences, r = .42. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the memory difficulties of the AD group appear to be an important cognitive factor interfering with their ability to integrate story events through the use of inferences and to create a global coherence to support text comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Two-month-old infants' sensitivity to changes in arbitrary syllable–object pairings: The role of temporal synchrony.

To explore early lexical development, the authors examined infants' sensitivity to changes in spoken syllables and objects given different temporal relations between syllable–object pairings. In Experiment 1, they habituated 2-month-olds to 1 syllable, /tah/ or /gah/, paired with an object in synchronous (utterances coincident with object motions, N = 16) or asynchronous (utterances erratic relative to object motions, N = 16) conditions. In the asynchronous condition, the audio track preceded or succeeded the visual track by 1,200 ms. On test, infants in the synchronous condition alone detected the changes. Post hoc computational analyses confirmed lower time separation, interpreted as greater synchrony, between peaks and onsets–offsets of visual motion and audio energy in the synchronous relative to the asynchronous condition. Further examining lexical development, in Experiment 2 they habituated 2-month-olds (N = 16) to two synchronous syllable–object pairs and tested them on switch versus same pairings. Infants failed to detect the switch in the pairings. These results suggest that 2-month-olds use synchrony to detect changes in one novel syllable–object pairing at a time, providing a basis for further word mapping development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)