A NEURAL NETWORK INVESTIGATION OF THE HEAD PREFERENCE: PROBLEMS EXPLAINING EMPIRICAL RESULTS BY BOTTOM-UP PROCESSES ALONE

摘要

Quinn & Eimas (1996a) and Spencer, Quinn, Johnson & Karmiloff-Smith (1997) have shown that 3- to 4-month-old infants mainly use head information to categorize basic-level exemplars like cats and dogs. The question raised in this paper is the following: could this preference for head information be explained by the statistics of the input related to the head or was an attentional component necessary? In other words, it might be possible that the statistical information related to the head of the animals is more useful for a distributed model of visual categorization. We used the distributed model of visual categorization proposed by Mareschal & French (1997) & Mareschal, French & Quinn (2000) to confirm ⅰ) that the infants may well use mainly head information to create their category representations and ⅱ) that this model, based on purely bottom-up processing, does not seem to be able to explain the preference for head-related information reported in 3- to 4-month-old infants. Finally, we suggest that an attentional focus on the head information might be necessary to simulate available behavioral data.