Main content
Category Flexibility in Emotion Learning
Date created: | Last Updated:
: DOI | ARK
Creating DOI. Please wait...
Category: Project
Description: Learners flexibly update category boundaries to adjust to the range of experiences they encounter. However, little is known about whether the degree of flexibility is consistent across domains. We examined whether categorization of social input, such as emotions, is afforded more flexibility as compared to other biological input. To address this question, children (6-12 years) categorized faces morphed from neutral to upset and animals morphed from a horse to a cow across task phases that differed in the distribution of stimuli presented. Learners flexibly adjusted both emotion and animal category boundaries according to distributional information, yet children showed relatively more flexibility in updating their category boundaries for emotions. These results provide support for the idea that children—who must adjust to the vast and varied emotional signals of their social partners—respond to social signals dynamically in order to make predictions about the interal states and future behaviors of others.