Redundancy matters: flexible learning of multiple contingencies in infants.

Many objects and events can be categorized in different ways, and learning multiple categories in parallel often requires flexibly attending to different stimulus dimensions in different contexts. Although infants and young children often exhibit poor attentional control, several theoretical proposals argue that such flexibility can be achieved without selective attention. If this is the case, then even young infants should be able to learn multiple dimension-context contingencies in parallel. This possibility was tested in four experiments with 14- and 22-month-olds. Learning of contingencies succeeded as long as there were multiple correlations between the context and the to-be-learned dimension. These findings suggest that infants can learn multiple dimension-context contingencies in parallel, but only when there is sufficient redundancy in the input.

许多物体和事件可以用不同的方式分类，同时学习多种类别往往需要在不同情境中灵活关注不同的刺激维度。尽管婴儿和幼儿常常表现出较差的注意力控制能力，但一些理论观点认为，这种灵活性可以在没有选择性注意力的情况下实现。如果是这样的话，那么即使是年幼的婴儿也应该能够同时学习多个维度 - 情境的关联。在针对14个月和22个月大的婴儿进行的四项实验中对这种可能性进行了测试。只要情境和要学习的维度之间存在多种关联，对关联的学习就能成功。这些发现表明，婴儿能够同时学习多个维度 - 情境的关联，但只有当输入中有足够的冗余信息时才可以。