Learning to Individuate: The Specificity of Labels Differentially Impacts Infant Visual Attention

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent‐directed storybook training with computer‐generated novel objects, event‐related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a pretraining, a no‐training control group (n = 11), and to infants trained with category‐level labels (e.g., all labeled “Hitchel”), infants trained with individual‐level labels (e.g., “Boris,” “Jamar”) displayed increased visual attention and neural differentiation of objects after training.