Cognitive Science Colloquium - Melissa Kibbe / Minimal, abstract object representations in the infant mind
Cognitive Science Colloquium - Melissa Kibbe / Minimal, abstract object representations in the infant mind
October 15, the Cognitive Science Colloquium welcomes Melissa Kibbe from Boston University, to discuss her work on the visual representation of objects.
Prelinguistic infants' object representations are often characterized either as image-like icons or as file-like representations containing rich physical information. In this talk, I will argue that infants have access to a sparse, abstract structure for object representations. I will describe work from my lab that shows that infants' object representations can contain no descriptive information about an object, can be enriched with abstract contents, can arise from non-perceptual inputs, and can support logical operators. I will argue that this minimal object representation operates within infants' language of thought, and forms the basis from which richer representations can develop.