I have a second cousin who is now only three, going on to four years old. Since the vocabulary she knows is limited, she sometimes has to use the superordinate-level category and feature theory of object recognition to name objects. Superordinate-level category of object recognition is when someone is naming objects they see in a more general term. For instance, instead of naming an object by its name, someone recognizes it by the category it is in. Feature theory of object recognition is when people recognize objects by remembering different features and parts of the object, and when they see the same features again in another object, they assume the two objects is the same thing.
Toddlers and children tend to do this when they have not enough words and experience stored in their head. When my second cousin sees something she has never seen before she uses the feature theory at times, naming objects the wrong name. For instance, when she first saw a tiger, she called it a big cat because they basically have the same features except tigers are bigger in size. Although tigers are under the cat category, she only calls it cat because it looks like a bigger cat for her.
Another example is when she was drawing a picture on newspapers once, she asked me to hand her the “pens.” She was pointing to her crayons at that time. This is not only an example of feature theory, because crayons and pens do look alike, but also an example of structural description theory. When she named crayons as pens because she knew them not only as having the similar features as pens, but also they have similar functions.
Both the examples of misnaming the tigers and crayons are also examples of superordinate-level category of recognizing objects as well. Because my second cousin is naming tigers as their general category- cats, and naming crayons in its general category- pens, this shows that she is using this concept of superordinate-level or object recognition.
4 thoughts on “Object Recognition”
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I have also had a similar experience with this with my cousin. When he was between 2 or 3 years old he was having the same experience with object recognition. His family has a dog named Paige, when he first saw my dog, which is the same breed as Paige, he was calling her Paige. He had it set in his mind that all Golden Retrievers were to be called Paige. It was really interesting to me that you had this experience at the zoo, because I had a very similar one at an aquarium. When we first entered there was a large tank with hundreds of different kinds of fish. So when he would point at one and say, “Fish!” I would tell him that he was correct in calling them a fish. When we got to the sharks he would point and say, “Fish!”. At this point I tried to correct him in saying that it was a shark. This confused him because he had the entry-level category of fish for anything that he would see swimming in the tanks. Reading this post and remembering my experience with my cousin made me wonder about how our recognition develops. I wonder if I would’ve taken him back to the aquarium a week or so after this if he would still refer to sharks as just fish.
When learning about object recognition in class, I hadn’t really considered what identifying objects was like for young children. I think that maybe the different categories of object recognition (entry-level category, subordinate-level category, and superordinate-level category) have a slightly different meaning for children or maybe these categories don’t exist for young children at all.
For example, if an adult sees a crayon, he or she would call it a crayon and this would be the entry-level category because it’s the label that first comes to mind when we see a crayon. The subordinate-level category, or more specific label, would be a ‘Crayola crayon’. And finally, the superordinate-level category, or more general label, may be ‘writing utensil’.
However, maybe these categories are different for children. Chances are a toddler doesn’t know the word or understand the concept of ‘writing utensil’. When a child sees a crayon, and immediately calls it a pen, that would be their entry-level category because it’s the first label that comes to mind. The subordinate-level category probably wouldn’t include ‘Crayola’ like it would for adults. Maybe if the crayon was blue, the subordinate-level category would be ‘blue pen.’ Or perhaps, depending on the child, they wouldn’t have a subordinate-level category for the crayon. A child also might not have a a superordinate-level category. For a toddler or young child, these categories may not exist at all, at least not until they can better recognize and better understand the world around them.
I think it is the most basic but the best way to explain object recognition. Your example of your three years old cousin well described how the object recognition applies to our lives. I had similar experience when I was babysitting four year old girl. She named deer with Bambi when she first saw deer in the zoo because she only had idea that anything under deer category is Bambi. I was only able to explain to her that Bambi was only the name of the deer and she seemed like she was very confused. Very interesting topic to apply in our daily lives. But I wonder how long it would take her to develop the new idea that cat and tiger are different objects. Would there be simplest way to develop how she can differentiate two different things? If there is one, I personally think that it could be great for early education.
I think this was a great way to describe object recognition and relate it to not only the way it happens, but the way humans start to develop. My niece and nephew do the same thing and I never really applied it to what we’ve learned.