Excerpt: The papers focus on two classes of learning problems: learning causal relations, from observing co- occurrences among events and active interventions; and learning how to organize the world into categories and map word labels onto categories, from observing examples of objects in those categories. Causal learning, category learning and word learning are all problems of induction, in which children form representations of the world’s abstract structure that extend qualitatively beyond the data they observe and that support generalization to new tasks and contexts. While philosophers have long seen inductive inference as a source of great puzzles and paradoxes, children solve these natural problems of induction routinely and effortlessly. Through a combination of new computational approaches and empirical studies motivated by those models, developmental scientists may now be on the verge of understanding how they do it.

This paper proposes an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words – words used to indicate observable situations, events, objects, or characteristics. Building on the education of attention model of learning, utterances of concrete words are defined as attentional actions: a repeatable form of behaviour performed by a person to indicate (i.e. point out) a particular aspect of the current situation to someone in order to achieve something. Based on recent empirical evidence on categorical colour perception, attentional actions are proposed to constrain the ongoing phenotypic reorganisation of persons into task-specific devices. The paper ends by situating the proposed account in a wider theoretical perspective on language. This paper serves two purposes: first, it undermines the scope objection against the ecological-enactive approach, and second, it provides a novel explanation for recent empirical evidence with respect to the role of language in categorical colour perception

Key words: attentional action, enactivism, ecological psychology, word learning, word-meaning, categorical perception.

The authors in this chapter focus on a case study of how object representations in infants interact with early word learning, particularly the nature of the so-called ‘shape bias’. A short review of the controversies in this subfield is used to illustrate the two dominant views of cognitive development, which can be roughly classified as nativist or empiricist. Also presented are theoretical arguments and new empirical evidence for a rational constructivist view of cognitive development. The authors’ goal in this chapter is to argue for a new approach to the study of cognitive development, one that is strongly committed to both innate concepts and representations, as well as powerful inductive learning mechanisms. In addition to discussing the ‘shape bias’ and how it relates to object representations, generality of the approach is briefly discussed.

Key words: object representations, early word learning, shape bias, cognitive development, nativist, empiricist, rational constructivist, innate concepts, inductive learning mechanisms, infants