PSY 244 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Joint Attention, Intersubjectivity, Hyperbolic Geometry
Document Summary
Concepts- general ideas that organize objects, events, and qualities, or relations on the basis of some similarity: help us understand the world and act effectively in it by allowing us to generalize from prior experience. Three general categories: inanimate objects, people, and other animals: allows children to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar entities. Spelke (2003)- infants begin life with a primitive theory of physics. Category hierarchies- categories organized according to set-subset relations- helps children make finer distinctions among the objects within each category. Even in the first months of life- infants form categories of objects. Infants frequently use perceptual categorization, the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances. Infants categorize objects along many perceptual dimensions- including color, size, and movement: categorization is largely based on specific parts of an object rather than on the object as a whole. As children approach their second birthday- they increasingly categorize objects on the basis of overall shape.
