Learning words from ambiguous naming events is difficult. In such situations, children struggle with not attending to task irrelevant information when learning object names. This paper reduces the problem space of learning names for object categories by holding color constant between the target and other extraneous objects. We examine how this influences two types of word learning (retention and generalization) in both 30-month-old children (Experiment 1) and the iCub humanoid robot (Experiment 2). Overall, all children and iCub performed well on the retention trials, but they were only able to generalize the novel names to new exemplars of the target categories if the objects were originally encountered in sets with objects of the same colors, not if the objects were originally encountered in sets with objects of different colors. These data demonstrate that less information presented during the learning phase narrows the problem space and leads to better word learning success for both children and iCub. Findings are discussed in terms of cognitive load and desirable difficulties.

中文翻译：

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当对象颜色是红鲱鱼时：无关的感知信息通过参照选择阻碍单词学习

从模棱两可的命名事件中学习单词很困难。在这种情况下，孩子们在学习物体名称时很难不注意与任务无关的信息。本文通过在目标和其他无关对象之间保持颜色不变来减少学习对象类别名称的问题空间。我们研究了这如何影响 30 个月大的儿童（实验 1）和 iCub 人形机器人（实验 2）的两种类型的单词学习（保留和泛化）。总体而言，所有儿童和 iCub 在保留试验中都表现良好，但如果对象最初是在具有相同颜色对象的集合中遇到的，则他们只能将新名称推广到目标类别的新样本，如果对象是最初是在具有不同颜色对象的集合中遇到的。这些数据表明，在学习阶段提供的信息越少，问题空间就越小，儿童和 iCub 的单词学习成功率越高。研究结果根据认知负荷和理想的困难进行了讨论。