Learning concepts and categories in the real world is often ac-companied by verbal labels. The existing theoretical accountsof how labels influence what we learn range from facilitationto overshadowing, with changes occurring over development.Studies investigating how labels influence what people learnhave typically been confined to a category learning framework,where participants were tasked to learn how to discriminatecategories or infer missing category properties. Here, we in-vestigate how the absence or presence of labels, both commonand unique, alter how people attend and what they remember ina more general setting. Our results suggest that unique labelsmay promote visual exploration of objects; whereas, there wasno evidence to support the claim that hearing the same labelassociated with different members of a to-be-learned categorydirected attention to common features.

Categorization, the process of grouping distinguishable entities into equivalence classes, is an essential component of human cognition. Although it has been often argued that selective attention is an important component of categorization, organism with immature selective attention (such as human infants or young children) exhibit the ability to learn categories. This research addresses this apparent paradox by examining attention allocation in the course of category learning across development. Results suggest that while some young children are able to attend selectively, adults more flexibly deploy selective attention according to task demands.

Categories are essential for thinking, learning, and communi-cating. Research has shown that young children and adultstreat categories very differently, with young children favor-ing whole objects while adults focus on the key informationin most cases. If so, then how can young children learn cat-egories requiring focused attention to key features? Studieshave shown that drawing attention to rules had facilitative ef-fects. We sought to identify whether the effect was driven byinstruction about rules or by stimulus-driven factors. Our re-sults suggest that even with instruction, 4-year-olds were notable to attend to key information. Simply making importantinformation more salient, however, allowed them to learn thecategory and transfer to situations when the key feature wasno longer salient.

Under some situations sensory modalities compete for attention, with one modality attenuating processing in a second modality. Almost forty years of research with adults has shown that this competition is typically won by the visual modality. Using a discrimination task on an eye tracker, the current research provides novel support for auditory dominance, with words and nonlinguistic sounds slowing down visual processing. At the same time, there was no evidence suggesting that visual input slowed down auditory processing. Several eye tracking variables correlated with behavioral responses. Of particular interest is the finding that adults’ first fixations were delayed when images were paired with auditory input, especially nonlinguistic sounds. This finding is consistent with neurophysiological findings and also consistent with a potential mechanism underlying auditory dominance effects