Simplicity and generalization: Short-cutting abstraction in children’s object categorizations
Introduction
The adaptive application of past experience to new circumstances requires the recognition of similarities between those past experiences and the present. The similarities that are relevant to useful generalizations are often embedded within many task irrelevant similarities and differences. Thus, processes of abstraction – of finding the right similarities – are crucial to theories of generalization in a variety of cognitive domains, including vision, language, social behavior, and higher level reasoning (Harnad, 2005, Macrae et al., 1994). Abstraction and generalization are also crucial to understanding the differences between immature and mature learners and between novices and experts; mature learners generally and experts more specifically seem to know the right similarities over which to generalize past experiences. This paper reports new findings on the relation between abstraction and generalization that derive from an experimental attempt to shortcut the learners’ needs to find the right similarities for themselves. The domain is the generalization of 3-dimensional object categories by 1½ to 2-year-old children.
One way or another, all theories of categorization are about abstraction. This is explicit in theories of prototype formation which propose summary descriptions of the commonalities across instances, thereby decreasing the influence of irrelevant, within-category variance on generalization (Homa et al., 1981, Posner and Keele, 1968, Rosch, 1973, Smith and Minda, 1998). Abstraction is implicit in theories of exemplar learning which use mechanisms such as selective attention to simplify available information by deemphasizing uninformative dimensions and emphasizing diagnostic ones (Nosofsky, 1984, Palmeri and Gauthier, 2004). By many accounts, young learners are deficient in these selective processes, failing to generalize what they have learned because they attend to too much information or to the wrong information (Gentner, 1988, Hartshorn et al., 1998, Keil and Batterman, 1984, Piaget, 1969). These same deficiencies also mark adult performance in domains in which they have had little experience. Like children, adult novice generalizations overly rely on immediately perceptible and salient features while experts are able to use subtle features that have been important in past experience (Barnett and Ceci, 2002, Gentner and Markman, 1997, Gick and Holyoak, 1987, Newell and Simon, 1972).
All this suggests that proper generalization requires forming the right abstraction. Considerable experimental and theoretical work suggests that forming such minimalist abstractions is best achieved by experiencing many diverse instances (Dixon and Bangert, 2004, O’Reilly and Munakata, 2000, Reeves and Weisberg, 1994). But could not just one instance also produce robust generalization, if that instance were simple in the right way with just the right properties for abstraction? That is, one might be able to short-cut training with diverse exemplars by directly teaching the relevant abstraction and, as a consequence, get broad and appropriate transfer. This is the hypothesis for the present experiment.
We test this hypothesis in the context of young children’s learning of object names. By 2½ years of age, children are skilled at generalizing object names, so skilled that they only need experience with one exemplar to generalize the name systematically to new instances by overall shape, ignoring other properties (Gershkoff-Stowe and Smith, 2004, Golinkoff et al., 1994, Heibeck and Markman, 1987, Landau et al., 1988). This ability to “fast map” (Heibeck & Markman, 1987) names of to novel objects of the same global shape occurs around the time children begin to recognize known object categories from highly abstract versions of their 3-dimensional shapes (Smith, 2003; see also Jones and Smith, 2005, Pereira and Smith, in press). The minimalist versions used in these studies were derived from a specific theory (Biederman, 1989) about the abstract internal representations of object shape that underlie adult object recognition. These objects consisted of 2–4 geometric volumes (“geons”) in a spatial arrangement that evoked common object categories (e.g., chair, cat, hat).
While recognizing geon-like versions of cats and chairs directly result from a process of abstraction over many instances, “fast mapping” – generalizing by shape after just one instance – is not as clearly connected to abstraction. One hypothesis tying these two developmental achievements together is that these shape-sensitive children are able to abstract structural information from texture and color-rich stimuli even after one training exemplar. In order to abstract shape information, a child must deemphasize differences on other dimensions and highlight shape. However, children with very little category experience may have trouble doing this for themselves and are thus unable to fast-map or identify abstract versions of known objects. This provides the basis for testing our hypothesis: by providing the learner with the right simplification, we can simulate abstraction and thus promote generalization. To this end, our participants are young children, who do not yet systematically generalize object names by shape (Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith, 2004) and are not expected to recognize simplified abstractions of common objects (Smith, 2003). Can we bolster children’s generalizations by providing them with simplified abstractions as the training exemplars?
Section snippets
Experiment 1
The first experiment is a straightforward test of the idea that minimalist descriptions of geometric structure promote appropriate category generalization (by shape) in young children. We do this by using novel stimuli and participants who are too young to extract the complex geometric shape of an object on their own. We attempt to induce better shape-based generalization by providing children with simplified renderings of object shape. In the training phase, we link an unfamiliar name either
Experiment 2
In real-life object categories, members usually differ in a number of irrelevant shape details. Perhaps simple training instances, having fewer details in general and preserving only the relevant ones, can direct attention to the relevant properties of more detailed transfer objects than vice versa. To test this hypothesis, there were two conditions in Experiment 2: Simple-to-Complex and Complex-to-Simple. In the Simple-to-Complex condition, children were presented with the simple version as
Experiment 3
Experiment 1 found that simple instances foster generalization to other similar and simple instances but complex instances do not generalize as well to other similar and complex instances. Experiment 2 found that simple abstract instances foster generalization to complex rich ones. Combining these two findings gives rise to an odd expectation. Is it possible that simple abstract instances generalize more easily to complex test objects than even a complex learning item? Could a Simple-to-Complex
Experiment 4
Thus far, the complexity of objects has been manipulated by varying the detail of their parts. Thus, there are two possible accounts for the generalization advantage for the simple objects observed in Experiments 1 and 2. First, objects that have idealized, smooth shapes with few details may generalize robustly because children are not distracted by a superfluity of details. Second, there may be a more general advantage for any simplified object, regardless of the nature of the simplification.
General discussion
Past research tells us that older word learners are more skilled and systematic in their generalization of object names than younger children (e.g., Gershkoff-Stowe and Smith, 2004, Woodward and Markman, 1998). Past research also tells us that older word learners also represent the shapes of objects more abstractly than younger children, in terms of minimalist descriptions of geometric structure (Smith, 2003; Jones & Smith, 2003). The present results imply a connection between these two
Conclusion
If there were enough time and resources for learners to experience a wide variety of many richly detailed instances, generalization would probably occur anyway. The type of mental abstractions that occur over many richly detailed instances is likely to be different from the experience of a single simple instance. However, the present results suggest that when there is only limited opportunity for training, a single instance in these experiments, simpler instances foster greater learning of the
Acknowledgements
We thank Megan Haselschwerdt, Jennifer Passell, and Shefalie Patel for assistance in running experiments. This research was funded by NIH Grants (HD007475 and HD28675) and a Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences Grant (R305H050116). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ji Y. Son at either [email protected] or Indiana University, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 1101 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47408.
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