ABSTRACT
Smart one-trial learning of whole categories defies ordinary psychological mechanisms of trial-and-error learning. Associative learning is the most fundamental and universal mechanism of psychological change. First, although children become smart learners of object names, they are not smart at the start. Children first begin to comprehend words around nine months, and they say their first words a little later. Second, the kinds of nouns children acquire early set the right circumstances for attentional learning. That is, there is a perceptible cue that is regularly associated with naming objects by shape. The children in the Training condition came to the laboratory once a week for nine weeks and were given extensive training on novel categories. The training results show that we can teach children to be smarter learners, with real-life consequences for those children. Traditional theories of cognition, both of the artificial and the biologically real, concentrated on the stability of cognition.
