Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a connectionist model of children's developing reliance on object labels as opposed to superficial appearance when making inductive inferences. The model learns to infer a fact about an object based on the object's label (and not percept) even though that fact has never been previously associated with the label. The shift in reliance from perceptual to label information is found to depend on; (a) the presence of a pre-linguistic ability to categorize perceptual information, and (b) the greater variability of percepts than labels. The model predicts that children will shift their inductive basis at different ages depending on the perceptual variability of the test categories. This prediction is discussed with respect to studies of children's induction and with particular reference to conflicting results reported in the literature concerning the onset of label use.