Two important and related developments in children between 18 and 24 months of age are the rapid expansion of object name vocabularies and the emergence of an ability to recognize objects from sparse representations of their geometric shapes. In the same period, children also begin to show a preference for planar views (i.e., views of objects held…

A growing number of studies suggests cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggests that Westerners typically…

The ability to recognize common objects from sparse information about geometric shape emerges during the same period in which children learn object names and object categories. Hummel and Biederman's (1992) theory of object recognition proposes that the geometric shapes of objects have two components--geometric volumes representing major object…

When children learn categories, they do not learn isolated facts but rather systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge are composed of property-property (e.g., things with wings tend to have feathers), property-role (e.g., things with eyes tend to eat), and role-role (e.g., things that eat tend to sleep) correlations. Research has shown that…