Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 27, Issue 1, January–March 2012, Pages 28-38
Cognitive Development

The shape bias is affected by differing similarity among objects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2011.09.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that visual properties of objects can affect shape-based categorization in a novel-name extension task; however, we still do not know how a relationship between visual properties of objects affects judgments in a novel-name extension task. We examined effects of increased visual similarity among the target and test objects in a shape bias task in young children and adults. Experiment 1 assessed college students with sets of objects whose similarity between target and test objects was either low or high similarity. Adults preferred shape when the similarity among objects was minimized. Experiment 2 tested 24-month olds in their use of the shape bias using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm. Children showed a shape bias only with items whose similarity to each other was low. These findings suggest that the visual properties of objects affect shape bias performance.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-nine undergraduates (14 female) participated, recruited from a university psychology department undergraduate participant pool. English was their first and dominant language. Ten additional adults served as participants for the similarity ratings. They included graduate students and research assistants who had no detailed knowledge of the purpose of their ratings.

Materials

The stimuli consisted of five ‘quartets’ of novel objects (see Fig. 1). Each quartet included one target object, made from

Experiment 2

In Experiment 1 we manipulated color-matching and overall-matching test objects in low-similarity and high-similarity conditions while keeping the target and the exact-shape match the same. In Experiment 2, we tested 24-month olds, using different stimuli in high- and low-similarity sets to minimize memory load. Moreover, we used the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPL) to reduce task demands. An advantage of the IPL paradigm is that the language abilities of children can be tested at

General discussion

In Experiment 1, we investigated whether adults preferred shape similarity vs. overall similarity in a novel-name extension task; we found that adults were more directed to shape with low-similarity items than with high-similarity items, regardless of the presence of a novel name. In Experiment 2, we examined the same phenomenon, this time with 2-year olds. Like adults, the children showed a stronger shape bias with low-similarity than high-similarity items; however, for the children this

Acknowledgements

We thank the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, NIHDCD, R01 DC07428) and the National Alliance for Autism Research for supporting this research. We are extremely grateful to all the parents and children for their cheerful participation. Thanks are also due to the numerous undergraduate students for their help in data collection and coding.

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