Word, thought, and deed: The role of object categories in children's inductive inferences and exploratory play.

It is well known that auditory nerve (AN) fibers overcome bandwidth limitations through the volley principle, a form of multiplexing. What is less well known is that the volley principle introduces a degree of unpredictability into AN neural firing patterns that may be affecting even simple stimulus categorization learning. We use a physiologically grounded, unsupervised spiking neural network model of the auditory brain with spike time dependent plasticity learning to demonstrate that plastic auditory cortex is unable to learn even simple auditory object categories when exposed to the raw AN firing input without subcortical preprocessing. We then demonstrate the importance of nonplastic subcortical preprocessing within the cochlear nucleus and the inferior colliculus for stabilizing and denoising AN responses. Such preprocessing enables the plastic auditory cortex to learn efficient robust representations of the auditory object categories. The biological realism of our model makes it suitable for generating neurophysiologically testable hypotheses.

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Category Markers or Attributes

Psychological Science ◽

10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02237.x ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 19 (12) ◽

pp. 1287-1293 ◽

Cited By ~ 41

Author(s):

Jean Keates ◽

Susan A. Graham

Keyword(s):

Category Membership ◽

Count Noun ◽

Single Word ◽

Grammatical Form ◽

Form Class ◽

Count Nouns ◽

Inductive Inferences ◽

Test Objects

To clarify the role of labels in early induction, we compared 16-month-old infants' ( n = 114) generalization of target properties to test objects when objects were introduced by the experimenter in one of the following ways: (a) with a general attentional phrase, (b) highlighted with a flashlight and a general attentional phrase, (c) via a recorded voice that labeled the objects using a naming phrase, (d) with a label consisting of a count noun embedded within a naming phrase, (e) with a label consisting of a single word that was not marked as belonging to a particular grammatical form class, and (f) with a label consisting of an adjective. Infants relied on object labels to guide their inductive inferences only when the labels were presented referentially, embedded within an intentional naming phrase, and marked as count nouns. These results suggest that infants do not view labels as attributes of objects; rather, infants understand that count-noun labels are intentional markers denoting category membership.

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The role of inhibition in moving beyond perceptually focused noun extensions

First Language ◽

10.1177/0142723717737195 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 38 (1) ◽

pp. 95-108 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Simon Snape ◽

Andrea Krott

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Cognitive Development ◽

Young Children ◽

Executive Control ◽

Potential Role ◽

Control Task ◽

Perceptual Features ◽

Object Categories ◽

Inhibition Ability

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object categories). The study tested 3- to 5-year old children on a noun extension task, alongside a test of their inhibition and more general executive control ability. Noun extensions were related to inhibition ability, independent of age. Noun extensions were not related to individual differences in the general executive control task. This suggests a potential role for inhibition in extension which is independent of other aspects of cognitive development.

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Auditory Nerve Stochasticity Impedes Auditory Category Learning: Learning: a Computational Account of the Role of Cochlear Nucleus and Inferior Colliculus in Stabilising Auditory Nerve Firing

10.1101/059428 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Irina Higgins ◽

Simon Stringer ◽

Jan Schnupp

Keyword(s):

Auditory Cortex ◽

Inferior Colliculus ◽

Cochlear Nucleus ◽

Auditory Nerve ◽

Neural Firing ◽

Object Categories ◽

Auditory Object ◽

Biological Realism ◽

Spiking Neural Network Model

AbstractIt is well known that auditory nerve (AN) fibers overcome bandwidth limitations through the “volley principle”, a form of multiplexing. What is less well known is that the volley principle introduces a degree of unpredictability into AN neural firing patterns which makes even simple stimulus categorization tasks difficult. We use a physiologically grounded, unsupervised spiking neural network model of the auditory brain with STDP learning to demonstrate that plastic auditory cortex is unable to learn even simple auditory object categories when exposed to the raw AN firing input without subcortical preprocessing. We then demonstrate the importance of non-plastic subcortical preprocessing within the cochlear nucleus (CN) and the inferior colliculus (IC) for stabilising and denoising AN responses. Such preprocessing enables the plastic auditory cortex to learn efficient robust representations of the auditory object categories. The biological realism of our model makes it suitable for generating neurophysiologically testable hypotheses.

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Supplemental Material for The Role of Object Categories in Hybrid Visual and Memory Search

Journal of Experimental Psychology General ◽

10.1037/a0036313.supp ◽

2014 ◽

Keyword(s):

Memory Search ◽

Object Categories

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Children's Inductive Inferences within Superordinate Categories: The Role of Language and Category Structure

Child Development ◽

10.2307/1130255 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 59 (4) ◽

pp. 876 ◽

Cited By ~ 82

Author(s):

Susan A. Gelman ◽

Anne Watson O'Reilly

Keyword(s):

Category Structure ◽

Inductive Inferences

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Concepts as Causal Models

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399550.013.21 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Bob Rehder

Keyword(s):

Causal Model ◽

Causal Models ◽

Causal Knowledge ◽

Causal Relations ◽

Inductive Inferences ◽

Category Discovery ◽

Model Approach

This chapter evaluates the case for treating concepts as causal models, the view that people conceive of a categories as consisting of not only features but also the causal relations that link those features. In particular, it reviews the role of causal models in category-based induction. Category-based induction consists of drawing inferences about either objects or categories; in the latter case one generalizes a feature to a category (and thus its members). How causal knowledge influences how categories are formed in the first place—causal-based category discovery—is also examined. Whereas the causal model approach provides a generally compelling account of a large variety of inductive inferences, certain key discrepancies between the theory and empirical findings are highlighted. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the new sorts of representations, tasks, and tests that should be applied to the causal model approach to concepts.

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