Look at this picture. Do you know exactly what are those animals? Even if we don’t know the exact name of this species we can gather that they are belong to monkeys because they look like monkeys. People sort things around them into categories. This helps us to structure the world around us. When we think about the thing we see it means that we are consciously trying to recognize it. Young infants don’t speak. Do they categorize things around them in the same way adults do?
Many psychological research found that young infants can indeed categorize things around them. For example, when they see an object for the first time they store the representation of it in the memory. Next time, when they see an object with similar features this object is compared to representations of the objects stored in the memory. If it is similar to those objects that were seen earlier then the novel object belongs to its category.
Researchers found that infants as young as 3-4 months have the ability to categorize things. Some species might have genetically inherited information about certain things like their predictor. Do people have any genetically inherited information stored in their memory? Psychological research suggests that it is unlikely. In their experiments they showed infants furniture to find out whether infants can categorize it. Experimental results have shown that infants can categorize furniture. It is unlikely that infants’ people have an inherited knowledge about different types of furniture! Our brain has an ability to learn about the world around us. How young infants learn if they don’t speak? Mandler (1997) suggested that they categorize on the basis of informations that we acquire through our senses. For example, infants might use information about color, shape, texture, sound and so on.
Does it imply that young infants that infants that have an exposure to lots of toys of different texture, sound, shape and color would develop quicker or better then those that do not? Let’s see now at the toy industry and the way they market to us toys for young infants. There are lots of toys made of different soft toys made of different texture materials, toys of different shapes so that an infant can learn them and compare, toys with different sounds and of different color. On some toys there was written that such toys help development of an infant. This is how businesses use psychological research to market to us their products.
Posted on May 3rd, 2008 by Irina Benjamin
Filed under: Child growth and development
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