Priming 4.5-month-old infants to use height information by enhancing retrieval.

Abstract

How do infants select and use information that is relevant to the task at hand? Infants treat events that involve different spatial relations as distinct, and their selection and use of object information depends on the type of event they encounter. For example, 4.5-month-olds consider information about object height in occlusion events, but infants typically fail to do so in containment events until they reach the age of 7.5 months. However, after seeing a prime involving occlusion, 4.5-month-olds became sensitive to height information in a containment event (Experiment 1). The enhancement lasted over a brief delay (Experiment 2) and persisted even longer when infants were shown an additional occlusion prime but not an object prime (Experiment 3). Together, these findings reveal remarkable flexibility in visual representations of young infants and show that their use of information can be facilitated not by strengthening object representations per se but by strengthening their tendency to retrieve available information in the representations.

Getting some space: Infants’ and caregivers’ containment and support spatial constructions during play

“…Experimental studiew have support the role of this experience in promoting learning, indicating a causal role of object manipulation on various aspects of infant cognition. For example, when given the opportunity to wear Velcro mittens that allow precocious lifting of objects, infants of four months subsequently demonstrate sensitivity to an actor's goal in reaching for an object (Sommerville, Needham & Woodward, 2005), segregate two spatially contiguous objects (Needham, 2000), interpret the goals of means-end actions (Gerson, Mahan, Sommerville, Matz, & Woodward, 2015;Wang, 2011), and respond to launching events on the basis of causality (Rakison & Krogh, 2012). Such skills do not typically emerge until several months later.…”

Infants Actively Construct and Update Their Representations of Physical Events: Evidence from Change Detection by 12-Month-Olds

“…If object interaction plays a crucial role in triggering the effects of event categories on infants' use of object information, removing object interaction should prevent the 12-month-olds from being affected. The infants could now rely on their memory of object features, making it more likely for them to detect the change (given that even 5-or 6month-olds have no difficulty retaining height information for several seconds [35][36][37]). As a result, infants in both conditions (short-to-tall or tall-to-short) should look reliably longer if they were shown a change event than if shown a nochange event.…”

Concepts are not icons

“…It can be presented as a three-way bootstrapping model where: (1) object-file representations, restricted by attention span, provide spatiotemporal cues for object individuation and placeholders for features assigned both bottom-up and top-down; (2) event category representations provide causal relations and guide attention to causally-relevant features; and (3) feature-based object representations by means of which temporary information provided by the aforementioned two systems is converted into permanent mental structures. Context-independence of these representations increases with development, and can be successfully trained (Wang 2011).…”