FriSem

Caroline Kaicher, PhD student in Psychology with Assistant Professor Laura Gwilliams and Professor Ellen Markman, will be presenting her FYP 

Title: Investigating Subordinate Category Learning in Children

Abstract: Subordinate categories (e.g., raven vs crow) exist within basic-level object categories (e.g., bird). While objects in different subordinate categories have only subtle visual differences, children can learn some of these categories by preschool. Learning subordinate categories requires children to make subtle distinctions between categories, and can result in a high level of precision and even expertise in object knowledge. Subordinate category labels are one important source of input for children (e.g., “Look at the crow!”). Despite the importance of subordinate categorization, the cognitive mechanisms and representational consequences of subordinate category learning in children, including the advantage of labels, are understudied. We designed a paradigm to test the developmental trajectories of two features of subordinate category learning shown in adults: 1) that category labels assist subordinate category learning over nonlinguistic cues, and 2) subordinate category learning results in an enhanced sensitivity to category-relevant feature dimensions. In the future, we aim to incorporate neural measures using OPM-MEG to better understand the neural processes that give rise to these behavioral effects, and how they might differ in children and adults.