Learning to Individuate: The Specificity of Labels Differentially Impacts Infant Visual Attention

Abstract

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a pretraining, a no-training control group (n = 11), and to infants trained with categorylevel labels (e.g., all labeled "Hitchel"), infants trained with individual-level labels (e.g., "Boris," "Jamar") displayed increased visual attention and neural differentiation of objects after training.

P300 development from infancy to adolescence

“…The ground‐breaking work by Nelson and Salapatek () set the stage for over 30 years of infant research examining the Nc across a variety of tasks, condition manipulations, and ages (Ackles & Cook, ; de Haan & Nelson, ; Karrer & Ackles, ; Marinović, Hoehl, & Pauen, ; Nelson, ; Nelson & Collins, ; Pickron, Iyer, Fava, & Scott, ; Reynolds, Guy, & Zhang, ; Reynolds & Richards, ; Richards, ) and LSW (de Haan, Johnson, & Halit, ; de Haan & Nelson, ; Nelson, ; Pascalis, De Haan, Nelson, & De Schonen, ; Reynolds & Richards, ; Webb, Long, & Nelson, ). However, whether there is a direct link between one of these components and the adult P300 is still debated.…”

“…These anterior regions are somewhat consistent with previously proposed adult P3a neural generators in adults (Polich, ). In a recent investigation that followed infants from 6 to 9 months, the Nc discriminated frequently and infrequently presented novel object stimuli, but only after a learning period during which objects were paired with individual‐level names (Pickron et al, ). Thus, results from these investigations suggest that the Nc indexes attention and is sensitive to probability after a familiarization/learning period.…”

Opportunities for Neurodevelopmental Plasticity From Infancy Through Early Adulthood

“…As discussed next, the 11 studies in this special section represent a wide-ranging set of brain-based functions and characteristics including (a) inputs that predict specific brain indices over time or elicit variation in brain reactivity, (b) brain connectivity at rest without specific inputs, and (c) individual differences related to features of long-term brain structure maturation. To assess brain reactivity and connectivity, the studies presented in this section used EEG (Lahat et al, 2018;MacNeill, Ram, Bell, Fox, & P erez-Edgar, 2018) and event-related potentials (ERPs; Brooker, 2018;Pickron, Iyer, Fava, & Scott, 2017) in early development, with the exception of Lahat et al who examined adolescents. To study change in adolescence and early adulthood, five studies used either fMRI while participants were at rest (Sylvester et al, 2017) or when paired with a task (Lauharatanahirun et al, 2018;Qu, Pomerantz, McCormick, & Telzer, 2018;Schreuders et al, 2018;Vilgis et al, 2018).…”

“…Three studies in this special section focus on within-person change in brain activity during infancy and early childhood. Pickron et al (2017) conducted an innovative intervention study over 3 months to examine change in infant brain response using ERPs during a visual attention task. The study randomly assigned 43 six-month-olds to either a parent-delivered training group or to a notraining group.…”

Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects

“…This effect of naming on individuation has been observed for other object categories, including familiar (e.g., strollers) and novel categories (19,20). Thus, naming category members with distinct but not consistent names supports infants' ability to distinguish among novel members of that category.…”