Rethinking Conceptually-Based Inference — Grounding Representation in Task and Behavioral Dynamics: Commentary on “Fifteen-month-old infants attend to shape over other perceptual properties in an induction task,” by S. Graham and G. Diesendruck, and “Form follows function: Learning about function helps children learn about shape,” by E. Ware and A. Booth

Abstract

The question of what representations underlie young children’s categorizations and early word learning has an extensive history. Answers have been shaped by several longstanding debates, including the conceptual/perceptual debate raised by Graham and Diesendruck (G&D) in their article in this issue. Their contribution to this debate is an experiment examining 15-month-old infants’ attention to shape, color and texture in an inductive inference task. Infants were presented with a novel object that possessed a nonobvious property demonstrated by acting on the object (e.g., the object squeaked when squeezed). They were then presented test objects that matched the exemplar in shape, color or texture and their attempts to produce the demonstrated properties observed. G&D found that infants performed the demonstrated actions most often with the shape-matching test objects. Furthermore, the number of actions infants performed was significantly related to the intercorrelated variables of vocabulary size, number of count nouns known, and age.The data presented by G&D make an important contribution to our understanding of infants’ performance in inductive inference tasks. In particular, no previous studies have examined infants’ differential attention to particular dimensions in these tasks, or related performance to vocabulary development. However, we disagree regarding the nature and implications of this contribution. We believe that this disagreement, to a large extent, stems from a more fundamental disagreement regarding the conceptual/perceptual debate. We first present our take on that debate. Briefly, we believe it is not so easy to separate perceptual and conceptual bases for children’s categorizations. Rather, we argue for a process-based account of categorization grounded in developmental accounts of perception, action, learning, attention and memory. We then illustrate how our take leads to a different interpretation of G&D’s data and thus a different conclusion regarding its implications.