Four‐month‐old infants individuate and track simple tools following functional demonstrations

Abstract

Two experiments examined whether 4-month-olds (n = 120) who were induced to assign two objects to different categories would then be able to take advantage of these contrastive categorical encodings to individuate and track the objects. In each experiment, infants first watched functional demonstrations of two tools, a masher and tongs (Experiment 1) or a marker and a knife (Experiment 2). Next, half the infants saw the two tools brought out alternately from behind a screen, which was then lowered to reveal only one of the tools (different-objects condition); the other infants saw similar events except that the same tool was shown on either side of the screen (same-object condition). In both experiments, infants in the different-objects condition looked reliably longer than those in the same-object condition, and this effect was eliminated if the demonstrations involved similar but non-functional actions. Together, these results indicate that infants (a) were led by the functional demonstrations they observed to assign the two tools to distinct categories, (b) recruited these categorical encodings to individuate and track the tools, and hence (c) detected a violation in the different-objects condition when the screen was lowered to reveal only one tool. Categorical information thus plays a privileged role in individuation and identity tracking from a very young age.

Five-Month-Old Infants Attribute Inferences Based on General Knowledge to Agents

“…Infants therefore tended to look back at the paused scene because their attention was recaptured as they waited for the agent to shake the toy, as she had done before. By using a short, 0.5-s look-away criterion, we could assess infants' initial response to the agent's selection of the wide or narrow toy (for other studies using a 0.5-s look-away criterion, see e.g., Stavans & Baillargeon, 2018 To reduce positive skewness, all looking times were log-transformed, and analyses were 2 A concern some readers might have about our procedure was that it used a variant of the violation-of-expectation method that is commonly used to study early psychological reasoning (e.g., infants saw a single test event, which was shown only once, followed by a paused scene; Luo & Baillargeon, 2007;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Scott et al, 2010;Surian et al, 2007;Vouloumanos et al, 2014). By contrast, when the violation-of-expectation method was first introduced several decades ago to study early physical reasoning, infants often saw two different test events on alternate trials, and in each trial the event was repeated continuously until the trial ended (Aguiar & Baillargeon, 2002;Baillargeon et al, 1985;Baillargeon & DeVos, 1991;Kotovsky & Baillargeon, 1998;Needham & Baillargeon, 1993).…”

Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena

“…By this account, children use teleological explanations when unwarranted due to the combination of two factors: (a) Children lack detailed knowledge of the physical mechanisms that account for the properties and origins of the natural world; and (b) From infancy, children intuitively understand other agents’ intentional behavior, including that other agents create and use objects as tools to achieve goals; and as a result privilege these types of explanations (Casler & Kelemen, 2005, 2007; Phillips, Seston & Kelemen, 2012; Futó, Téglás, Csibra, & Gergely, 2010; Kelemen, 2012; Meltzoff, 1995; Hernik & Csibra, 2015; Stavans & Baillargeon, 2016). Thus, when confronted with questions about other aspects of the natural world, children fill their explanatory gap with what they know – their theory of animate agents and tools, which rests on functions and goals – and generate a teleological explanation.…”

Semantic knowledge influences visual working memory in adults and children

“…The majority of these studies use the individuation and identity tracking task [14], which tests infants on their ability to determine whether one or two objects are hidden behind an occluder. In this paradigm, older infants correctly recognize that there are multiple objects present when the objects belong to different categories, and younger infants succeed when these contrasting categories are highlighted within the experiment [14][15][16][17]. Together, these results demonstrate that semantic knowledge helps infants individuate objects within an array, which is an important precursor for success on working memory change detection tasks [18].…”