{"pk":26933,"title":"A Rational Constructivist Account of the Characteristic-to-Defining Shift","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A widely observed phenomenon in children’s word-extensionsand generalizations is the characteristic-to-defining shift,whereby young children initially generalize words based ontypical properties and gradually transition into generalizingwords using abstract, logical information. In this paper, wepropose a statistically principled model of conceptual devel-opment grounded in the trade-off between simplicity and fit tothe data. We run our model based on informant-provided fam-ily trees and the real-life characteristic features of people onthose trees. We demonstrate that the characteristic-to-definingshift does not necessarily depend on discrete change in rep-resentation or processes. Instead, the shift could fall out nat-urally from statistical inference over conceptual hypotheses.Our model finds that the shift occurs even when abstract logicalrelations are present from the outset of learning as long as char-acteristic features are informative but imperfect in their abilityto capture the underlying concept to be learned—a property ofour elicited features.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"characteristic-to-defining shift; concept learning;development; computational modeling"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/86h0b8bd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Francis","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mollica","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""},{"first_name":"Shirlene","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wade","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""},{"first_name":"Steven","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Piantadosi","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26933/galley/16569/download/"}]}