Biomedical subjects

Sabina Pauen

Publications and source records attributed to Sabina Pauen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

The role of functional information for infant categorization.

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1 revealed that infants categorized the objects according to overall similarity but not part similarity under control conditions. Experiment 2 showed that after having seen the experimenter demonstrating the functional use of the critical part, infants later categorized the stimuli according to part similarity. When the same actions were performed without producing any effect, infants failed to categorize according to the critical part. This set of findings suggests that 11-12-month old infants use functional information as a cue to categorization.

Association Learning↗

PubMed2006

Physiological and behavioral parameters of infants' categorization: changes in heart rate and duration of examining across trials.

This report investigates the relations between duration of examining and heart rate (HR) across several trials of an object-examination task. A total of N= 20 11-month-olds were familiarized with a sequence of 10 different exemplars from the same global category (animals or furniture) before they received an exemplar from the contrasting category at test. Consistent with previous findings, HR was lower during states of focused attention (i.e. examining) than during states of casual attention (i.e. looking) or non-looking. Over the familiarization trials, examining stayed about the same, while mean HR increased. At test, examining increased and mean HR decreased, indicating that infants focused their attention on the out-of-category object. Psychophysiological and behavioral measures of attention were systematically related over trials, suggesting that heart rate provides a suitable objective measure to study infants' categorization performance in object-examination tasks.

Attention↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Evidence for knowledge-based category discrimination in infancy.

Two studies examined whether infants' category discrimination in an object-examination task was based solely on an ad hoc analysis of perceptual similarities among the experimental stimuli. In Experiment 1A, 11-month-olds examined four different exemplars of one superordinate category (animals or furniture) twice, followed by a new exemplar of the familiar category and an exemplar of the contrasting category. Group A (N = 39) explored natural-looking toy replicas with low between-category similarity, whereas group B (N = 40) explored artificial-looking toy models with high between-category similarity. Experiment 1B (N = 40) tested a group of 10-month-olds with the same design. Experiment 1C (N = 20) reversed the order of test trials. For Experiment 2 (N = 20), the same artificial-looking toy animals as in Experiment 1 (group B) were used for familiarization), but no category change was introduced at the end of the session. Infants' responses varied systematically only with the presence of a category change, and not with the degree of between-category similarity. This supports the hypothesis that performance was knowledge based.

Adult↗