ABSTRACT

Quinn and Eimas (1998) reported that young infants include non-human animals (i.e., cats, horses, and fish) in their category representation for humans. To account for this surprising result, it was proposed that the representation of humans by infants functions as an attractor for non-human animals and is based on infants’ previous experience with humans. We report three simulations that provide a computational basis for this proposal. These simulations show that a “dual-network” connectionist model that incorporates both bottom-up (i.e., short-term memory) and top-down (i.e., long-term memory) processing is sufficient to account for the empirical results obtained with the infants.