"These results suggest that semi-supervised learning can be quite powerful. Seeing just two labeled examples jump-starts infants' category learning. Once they've heard a few objects receive the same label, infants can learn the rest on their own, with or without labels," said Alexander LaTourrette, the lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Moreover, the timing of the labeling mattered. If the two labeling episodes came at the end of the learning phase, after infants had already seen the unlabeled objects, they failed to learn the category. This tells us that infants can use semi-supervised learning. They use the power of labeling to learn more from subsequent, unlabeled objects. - www.sciencedaily.com