Layla Unger

The Ohio State University | OSU · Department of Psychology

Our knowledge about the world is represented not merely as a collection of concepts, but as an organized lexico-semantic network in which concepts can be linked by relations, such as “taxonomic” relations between members of the same stable category (e.g., cat and sheep), or association between entities that occur together or in the same context (e....

Semantic knowledge is a crucial aspect of higher cognition. Theoretical accounts of semantic knowledge posit that relations between concepts provide organizational structure that converts information known about individual entities into an interconnected network in which concepts can be linked by many types of relations (e.g., taxonomic, thematic)....

The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is crucially important for many cognitive processes, and its emergence during childhood is a key focus of cognitive development research. Prior evidence about the role of learning and experience in the development of knowledge organization primarily comes from studies investigati...

Prior evidence suggests that category learning can occur implicitly by detecting regular co-occurrences of features within categories. Less studied is whether regularities wherein category membership predicts other events or actions also foster category learning. Moreover, we know little about whether, and to what degree, exposure to these regulari...

Our knowledge of words consists of a lexico-semantic network in which different words and their meanings are connected by relations, such as similarity in meaning. This research investigated the integration of new words into lexico-semantic networks. Specifically, we investigated whether new words can rapidly become linked with familiar words given...

Humans selectively attend to task-relevant information in order to make accurate decisions. However, selective attention incurs consequences if the learning environment changes unexpectedly. This trade-off has been underscored by studies that compare learning behaviors between adults and young children: broad sampling during learning comes with a b...

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's real‐wo...

Humans selectively attend to task-relevant information in order to make accurate decisions. However, selective attention incurs consequences if the learning environment changes unexpectedly. This trade-off has been underscored by studies that compare learning behaviors between adults and young children: broad sampling during learning comes with bre...

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of t...

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades‐old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of t...

Categories are a fundamental building block of cognition that simplify the multitude of entities we encounter into equivalence classes. By simplifying this barrage of inputs, categories support reasoning about and interacting with their members. For example, despite differences in size, color, and other features, we can treat members of the categor...

Categories are a fundamental building block of cognition that simplify the multitude of entities we encounter into equivalence classes. By simplifying this barrage of inputs, categories support reasoning about and interacting with their members. For example, despite differences in size, color, and other features, we can treat members of the categor...

With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early-developing associative (e.g., juicy-apple) and gradually-developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple-pear). Word co-occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co-occurrence (e.g., juicy-apple), and taxonomic links from s...

Within many theories of categorization, selective attention is described as a critical mechanism by which salient information is preferentially encoded during learning. Foundational model implementations of this idea estimate differences in encoding variability by specifying salience at the level of each dimension. We propose that overt attention d...

Early word learning may get off the ground by mapping words to referents that accompany them. For example, a child might learn the meaning of the word “apple” from hearing “apple” in the presence of apples. However, when a word occurs without a handy referent, the other words that accompany it might provide a rich source of information about its me...

Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teachin...

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between apple, juicy, and pear. These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become integrated into our semantic networks? Here,...

Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teachin...

Selective attention allows adults to preferentially exploit input relevant to their goals. One critical role of selective attention is in adult category learning: adults can simplify the entities they encounter into groups of entities that they can treat as equivalent by focusing on category-relevant attributes, while filtering out category-irrelev...

The decisions we make in our everyday lives often require us to navigate through a barrage of information, so that we can base our decisions only on information that is relevant to our goals. Selectively attending only to goal-relevant dimensions of information can help us efficiently navigate this barrage of information, but can also lead us into...

As adults, we draw upon our ample knowledge about the world to support such vital cognitive feats as using language, reasoning, retrieving knowledge relevant to our current goals, planning for the future, adapting to unexpected events, and navigating through the environment. Our knowledge readily supports these feats because it is not merely a coll...

As adults, we draw upon our ample knowledge about the world to support such vital cognitive feats as using language, reasoning, retrieving knowledge relevant to our current goals, planning for the future, adapting to unexpected events, and navigating through the environment. Our knowledge readily supports these feats because it is not merely a coll...

Semantic relations between words (e.g., between drink and soda) are crucial for language fluency. Language is replete with statistical regularities from which people can potentially form these links. We focus on two such regularities: direct co-occurrence and shared co-occurrence. Words that appear together in sentences and express meaningful ideas...

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated t...

Language is rich in statistical regularities that capture meaningful, semantic links between words crucial for language fluency. Words that can be combined to express meaningful ideas (e.g., drink-soda) reliably directly co-occur together, and words similar in meaning share patterns of co-occurrence (e.g. soda and milk share co-occurrence with drin...

Many hallmarks of human intelligence including language, reasoning, and planning require us to draw upon knowledge about the world in which concepts, denoted by words, are organized by meaningful, semantic links between them (e.g., juicy-apple-pear). The goal of the present research was to investigate how these organized semantic networks may emerg...

We can understand and express an unlimited variety of meaningful ideas using language. This remarkable ability depends on the fact that as we learn words, they become organized according to meaningful, semantic links, such as those connecting apple, juicy, eat, and pear. Extensive computational evidence attests that everyday language is rich in sta...

With development, we acquire a rich body of knowledge about the world. This knowledge is represented by concepts, denoted by words (e.g., juicy, apple, and pear), which are connected by meaningful, semantic links (e.g., apples and pears are similar, and can both be juicy). One potentially powerful driver of this development is sensitivity to regula...

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive process whereby one can perceive and represent readily discriminable entities (e.g., a husky and a German shepherd) as similar or the same in some fundamental ways (i.e., both are dogs). Because of the foundational role and numerous advantages of categorization in cognition, the development of the ability t...

Our knowledge about the world is represented not merely as a collection of concepts, but as an organized lexico-semantic network in which concepts can be linked by relations, such as “taxonomic” relations between members of the same stable category (e.g., cat and sheep), or association between entities that occur together or in the same context (e....

The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is crucially important for many cognitive processes, and its emergence during childhood is a key focus of cognitive development research. Prior evidence about the role of learning and experience in the development of knowledge organization primarily comes from studies investigati...

Our knowledge of the world is an organized lexico-semantic network in which concepts can be linked by relations, such as "taxonomic" relations between members of the same stable category (e.g., cat and sheep), or association between entities that occur together or in the same context (e.g., sock and foot). Prior research has focused on the emergenc...

The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is crucially important for many cognitive processes, and its emergence during childhood is a key focus of cognitive development research. Prior evidence about the role of learning and experience in the development of knowledge organization primarily comes from studies investigati...

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated t...

Sensitivity to statistical co-occurrence regularities is present from infancy. This sensitivity may contribute to learning in many domains, including category learning. However, prior research has not examined whether everyday input conveys category-relevant statistical regularities. This study assessed whether statistical regularities relevant to...

The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is critically involved in many cognitive processes, including memory and reasoning. However, the role of learning in shaping knowledge organization has received little direct investigation. Therefore, the present study investigated whether informal learning experiences can drive...

This study examined neural activity associated with inductive inference using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Induction is a powerful way of generating new knowledge by generalizing known information to novel items or contexts. Two key bases for identifying targets for induction are perceptual similarity, and rules that specify categ...

The roles of semantic and perceptual information in cognition are of widespread interest to many researchers. However, disentangling their contributions is complicated by their overlap in real-world categories. For instance, attempts to calibrate visual similarity based on participant judgments are undermined by the possibility that semantic knowle...

Category-based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category-based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased diffe...

Semantic knowledge contains information about both individual concepts and relationships between concepts. Relationships come in many forms, including taxonomic and thematic, and are critical for converting collections of attributes known about each entity into an interconnected web of semantic knowledge. According to computational modeling studies...

Although the averageness hypothesis of facial attractiveness proposes that the attractiveness of faces is mostly a consequence of their averageness, 1 study has shown that caricaturing highly attractive faces makes them mathematically less average but more attractive. Here the authors systematically test the averageness hypothesis in 5 experiments...