Infant Cognition

Abstract

This chapter reviews the various methods that researchers have used to study infant cognition from birth through 2 years of age. Most of these methods can also be adapted to the study of infant perception. The authors have emphasized research methods that have been applied to classic experimental problems, including habituation, classical and operant conditioning, detour learning, concept formation, categorization, spatial learning, serial‐list learning, and memory processing. Some of the well‐developed methods that have been applied to a particularly wide range of problems are highlighted. In the learning section, for example, the authors have detailed the basic features of habituation and conditioning phenomena; later in the chapter, they describe how habituation and conditioning procedures have been used as tools to study other cognitive phenomena in infants. The chapter also includes descriptions of some of the methods that have been developed to study special problems in early cognition, such as infants' object representations (individuation, segmentation), their understanding of number and causality, and their attentional processes in visual search tasks. Finally, the chapter considers problems commonly encountered in infant research as well as some of the practices that can lead to ambiguous results and erroneous conclusions.

Rapid acquisition of operant conditioning in 5‐day‐old rat pups: A new technique articulating suckling‐related motor activity and milk reinforcement

“…Relatively brief and non-invasive techniques involving operant conditioning in infant rats are scarce (But see, Alberts & May, 1984;Chen & Amsel, 1980;Johanson & Hall, 1979;Lithgow & Barr, 1984). Analogous techniques developed for human babies have allowed valuable contributions for understanding the acquisition, retention and expression of early memories derived from the contingency of age-specific behaviors and availability of positive reinforcement (e.g., Rovee-Collier, 1987;Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2002).…”

Beyond the Bayley: Neurocognitive Assessments of Development During Infancy and Toddlerhood

“…Although there are many established methods for measuring memory (e.g., novelty preference memory tests), the focus here is on operant conditioning, visual recognition memory (VRM), and deferred imitation, as these have the strongest empirical base and are the best predictors of cognitive outcomes (see Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2001;. Among the principles employed to illustrate best practices for intervention tracking are 1) parameterization of tasks essential for reliable and valid assessment, 2) measurement of both memory recall and memory flexibility; 3) assessment of the predictive validity of the measures, and; 4) examination of memory as a possible precursor to other more complex cognitive outcomes.…”

“…Operant Conditioning. Over the past 40 years, operant conditioning has been studied utilizing the mobile conjugate reinforcement and train tasks, resulting in an extensive empirical base (Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2001). In this task, 2 to 6-month-old infants learn to kick to move an overhead mobile.…”

Procedural memory in infancy: Evidence from implicit sequence learning in an eye-tracking paradigm

“…This was the reason for implementing the inclusion criterion for infants. Attrition is common in infancy studies and attrition in the current study is not different to what might be expected when studying infant cognition (Kirkham et al, 2007;Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2002;Wang et al 25 2012). Our 9-month-old participants had been watching 4 minutes of television before starting the SRT procedure.…”