A solution to generalized learning from small training sets found in infants’ repeated visual experiences of individual objects

One-year-old infants rapidly form and generalize categories from idiosyncratic experiences of very few exemplars of those categories. Here we provide evidence on the statistics of infants’ daily-life visual experiences for 8 object categories. Using a corpus of infant head-camera images recorded at mealtimes (87 mealtimes,14 infants), we measure the frequency of the unique instances of each category and the variability of the visual experiences within and across instances of the same category. The frequency distributions of instances for individual infants are highly skewed, containing many images of the same few objects along with fewer images of other instances. Graph theoretic measures of individual category experiences for individual children reveal a “lumpy” mix of high similarity and high variability, organized into multiple but interconnected clusters of high-similarity images. In computational experiments, we show that artificially created training sets characterized by an interconnected mix of high and low similarity support generalization to novel instances after limited training. We discuss implications for category recognition, and for learning more generally, by both humans and machines.