Abstract
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, specifically emotions, is afforded more flexibility as compared to other biological input. To address this question, children (6–12 years; 32 female, 37 male; 7 Hispanic or Latino, 62 not Hispanic or Latino; 8 Black or African American, 14 multiracial, 46 White, 1 selected “other”) categorized faces morphed from calm 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 more flexibility when 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 internal states and future behaviors of others.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the families who participated in this study and the research assistants who helped conduct the research, particularly Cassandra Windau, Carolyn Meissner, and Emily Weiss. Images were reproduced with permission from Tottenham et al. (2009) and Wood et al. (2016). The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board.
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This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health through grant R01MH61285 to S.D.P. and in part by a core grant to the Waisman Center from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P50HD105353). R.C.P. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1256259) and the Richard L. and Jeanette A. Hoffman Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship.
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The authors declare competing interest.
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The experimental paradigm, de-identified data, and analysis scripts are available on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/zckxq/.
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S.D.P. acquired funding for the research. R.C.P. and K.W. conducted data curation and formal analysis. R.C.P. prepared the original draft of the manuscript. All authors were involved with conceptualization, methodology, and reviewing and editing.
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The Institutional Review Board approved the research.
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The parents of all participants provided informed written consent.
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Plate, R.C., Woodard, K. & Pollak, S.D. Category Flexibility in Emotion Learning. Affec Sci 4, 722–730 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00192-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00192-3