Novelty, attention, and challenges for developmental psychology

Mather, Emily

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00491

Cited by 48 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We cannot rule this out for older children who overcome their novelty biases (e.g., Horst & Samuelson, ), or for some children in this study who may have operated based on name‐knowledge. That said, our results are in line with other studies that show the pervasive influence of novelty in word learning (Mather, ; Mervis & Bertrand, ) in that the young vocabulary learners here chose the novel objects even when the task was to ignore them (see also control trials in Frank, Sugarman, Horowitz, Lewis, & Yurovsky, ). This challenges the idea that children are using novelty in a goal‐directed way to advance their linguistic knowledge (Horst et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18‐Month‐Old Children and Associative Learning Models

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word-referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18-month-old children’s performance on referent selection and retention with novel and known words. The results reveal a pervasive novelty bias on referent selection with both known and novel names and, across individual children, a negative correlation between attention to novelty and retention of new word-referent links. A computational model examines possible sources of the bias, suggesting novelty supports in-the-moment behavior but not retention. Together, results suggest that when lexical knowledge is weak, attention to novelty drives behavior, but alone does not sustain learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate that word learning may be driven, in part, by low-level perceptual processes.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18‐Month‐Old Children and Associative Learning Models

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Our results are apparently inconsistent with the findings of previous studies that reported novel (unusual) events can interrupt ongoing mental process, change the orientation of attention, and make delay in motor response even in newborns (Folstein, Van Petten, & Rose, 2008; Mather, 2013). However, it should be noted that in those studies, novel stimuli were not presented as distractors, the presentation location of novel or unusual stimuli was not far from the focus of attention, and the subjects were not requested to fix their initial position of their attention on a place that had a considerable distance from the attraction basin of distractors.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Response of the Pre-oriented Goal-directed Attention to Usual and Unusual Distractors: A Preliminary Study

Baghdadi

Towhidkhah

Rostami

et al. 2017

BCN

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introduction:In this study, we investigated the distraction power of the unusual and usual images on the attention of 20 healthy primary school children.Methods:Our study was different from previous ones in that the participants were asked to fix the initial position of their attention on a predefined location after being presented with unusual images as distractors. The goals were presented in locations, which were far from the attraction basin of distractors. We expected that the pre-orienting of the attention to the position of targets would reduce the attractive effect of unusual images compared to the usual ones. The percentage of correct responses and the reaction time were measured as behavioral indicators of attention performance.Results:Results showed that using the goal-directed attention, subjects ignored both kinds of distractors nearly the same way.Conclusion:With regard to previous reports about more attraction towards the unusual images, it is suggested that the dynamics of the visual attention system be sensitive to the initial condition. That is, changing the initial position of the attention can lead to the decrement of the unusual images effects. However, several other possibilities such as a probable delay in processing unusual features could explain this observation, too.

show abstract

“…Indeed, the phenomenon of repetition suppression has been well documented in the adult brain (sometimes called fMRI adaptation; see review in Grill-Spector, Henson & Martin, 2006). Moreover, repetition suppression appears to mirror the well-known behavioral phenomenon in the developmental literature of habituation where infants exhibit decreased looking time to familiar stimuli over successive exposures (Mather, 2013;Turk-Browne, Scholl & Chun, 2008). Thus, we might expect that infants who are repeatedly exposed to the same stimulus during a learning task will show decreases in neural activity in regions of the brain involved in learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Tracing trajectories of audio‐visual learning in the infant brain

Kersey

Emberson

2016

Developmental Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to record hemodynamic responses in the infant cortex (temporal, occipital, and frontal cortex), we find that across the infant brain, learning is characterized by an increase in activation followed by a decrease. We take this U-shaped response as evidence of repetition enhancement during early stages of learning and repetition suppression during later stages, a result that mirrors the Hunter and Ames model of infant visual preference. Furthermore, we find that the neural response to violations of the learned associations can be predicted by the shape of the learning curve in temporal and occipital cortex. These data provide the first look at the shape of the neural response during audio-visual associative learning in infancy establishing that diverse regions of the infant brain exhibit systematic changes across the time-course of learning.

show abstract

Novelty, attention, and challenges for developmental psychology

Cited by 48 publications

References 43 publications

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18‐Month‐Old Children and Associative Learning Models

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18‐Month‐Old Children and Associative Learning Models

Response of the Pre-oriented Goal-directed Attention to Usual and Unusual Distractors: A Preliminary Study

Tracing trajectories of audio‐visual learning in the infant brain

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About