Abstract
Visual categorisation has a pervasive role in human perception and cognition and understanding the development of this capacity has become a major objective for many psychologists. Various behavioural studies have shown that young infants can categorise visual information in a range of different domains. However, such investigations reveal little about the mechanisms underlying categorisation. Recent research has used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time course and neural processes involved in visual categorisation in infancy. These studies have investigated categorisation of objects, animals and colours in infants aged 6-7 months using familiarisation and oddball paradigms. Despite variations in the type of stimuli, design and procedure, these studies have revealed similar ERP waveform morphologies. Category effects have been found for the negative central (Nc), the negative slow wave (NSW) and the positive slow wave (PSW). This suggests that infant visual categorisation is governed by processes of attention (Nc), novelty detection (NSW) and memory and context updating (PSW) and that these mechanisms are common across different domains. These ERP studies provide a theoretical and methodological framework for investigating infant categorisation. This framework will be presented and used to derive directions for future research.