There is more to fast-mapping than meets the eye

There is more to fast-mapping than meets the eye

Cristina Galusca1, Martín Guida Fórneas 1, and Luca L. Bonatti 1,2

1 Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

2 ICREA

The current studies investigate the role of one ostensive cue, eye contact, on the long term acquisition of novel names and two types of facts (specific and generic) induced by fast-mapping, in 5-year-old children. During an object-matching game, participants were incidentally presented with novel names and facts associated to some of the novel objects. We evaluated the effect of eye contact on the retention of information right after the presentation and at a week interval. The results revealed a better performance when information was presented with eye contact, an effect maintained even a week after only a brief exposure. This seems to suggest that eye contact modifies the relevance of the information presented and thus, improves long-term retention of names and facts. Overall, facts were significantly better retained than names and we found no difference in the performance for specific and generic facts. Interestingly, in the second session, the performance for names was above chance only when the presentation was done making eye contact, which seems to be in agreement with the “natural pedagogy” theory which highlights the importance of ostensive cues in encoding object identity.