Strong categorization explains rapid one shot learning

Humans can learn new categories very quickly without having to do much data gathering and hypothesis testing. Infants learn thousands of new concepts very quickly and without much exposure to the broader world—a learning infant spends a great deal of time looking at their mother’s face, a sippy cup, or a ceiling.

Strong categorization may be key to explaining how this is possible. A strong category is a stable pattern of interaction across body, environment, and task. Strong categories have the property of seeming natural, almost inevitable, once they become optimal. The body simply falls into the relevant attractor.

Unlike weak categories, which are formed via a laborious process of comparing many instances with each other until a robust statistical pattern emerges, strong categories “just happen” as a consequence of lawful interactions between coupled elements in a system. Thus, the system potentially does not need to have ever previously constructed a category for an instance of it to emerge. Rather than having to see 500 dogs to know what a dog is, the attractor just stabilizes.

How do strong categories reliably form in infants so quickly? I don’t know, but here’s some speculation. First, the attractor space already exists; the infant just has to couple to it to behave in a way that anticipates its trajectory. This means that the infant doesn’t have to create attractors ex nihilo but instead has to differentiate the existing space, a space that it naturally participates in by virtue of being a body in the world. A new category is thus carved out by a small perturbation to an existing attractor basin. It’s bifurcation.

Doing something as simple as staring at the ceiling would in fact give an infant a strong basis to start building new categories from since staring at the ceiling teaches the infant about the invariant structure of visual flow and gravity. This experience then can be generalized and transformed in application to other circumstances. Bifurcations would be triggered by the need to maintain relational homeostasis in changing circumstances.

How does the system maintain stability as it forms new categories? My guess is that rapid and accurate one-shot category construction is enabled by a cognitive glue. The cognitive glue holds the elements of the infant together, and keeps the infant coupled to the environment and task, so experimentation propagates rapidly through the infant, and the experimental category and the rest of the system are quickly forced to cohere to each other. Bad experiments simply fail to stabilize and vanish harmlessly, making them very low cost, while good experiments stabilize quickly.

Tellingly, not only do infants form categories very quickly, but they also maintain categories past when they should, as in the case of the infant perseverative error. These phenomena may be two sides of the same coin. Perhaps the more open a system is to forming new categories, the less skilled it necessarily is at matching categories to the situation. Development may ultimately close down attractor sensitivity, trading flexibility for precision.