A Computational Account of the Development of the Generalization of Shape Information

Abecassis, Sera, Yonas, and Schwade (2001) have shown that young children represent shapes more metrically, and perhaps more holistically, than do older children and adults. How does a child transition from representing objects and events as undifferentiated wholes to representing them explicitly in terms of their attributes--including invariant aspects of objects' shapes--and the relations among those attributes? According to recognition-by-components theory objects are represented as collections of arranged geons. We propose that the transition from more holistic to more categorical shape processing is a function of the development of geon-like representations. We present a model, DORA, that was originally proposed to solve the problem of discovering relations, but can also learn representations of single geons from representations of multi-geon objects. We demonstrate that DORA follows the same trajectory humans do, originally generalizing shape more holistically and eventuall...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COGSCI
• Authors: Leonidas A. A. Doumas, John E. Hummel
• Keywords: Child Transition, COGSCI 2010, Older Children, Young Children