Studies in Inductive Inference in Infancy

Advancing Downward to the Basic Level

“…This finding indicates that they understood that animals drink but vehicles do not. Furthermore, if we gave them another dog and a cat, they were as likely to use the cat as the dog to imitate what they had seen (Mandler & McDonough, 1998b). This finding also indicates that infants understand that animals drink, but in addition that they may have construed the event they watched not so much as a dog drinking but in a more general way as an animal drinking.…”

“…Until recently, the hypothesis that basic-level concepts are the first to be formed was typically tested with children 3 years old or older (e.g., Rosch et al, 1976). In the past decade, however, research has begun to show that concept formation has its origins in infancy, and in our laboratory we have conducted a number of experiments indicating that the earliest concepts are broader than the level of dog, table, car, and cup; instead they appear to be at the level of animal (or mammal), furniture, vehicle, and utensil (Mandler & McDonough, 1993, 1996, 1998a, 1998b.…”

“…In our most recent series of experiments investigating concept formation in infancy, we used a generalized imitation technique (Mandler & McDonough, 1996, 1998bMcDonough & Mandler, 1998; see also Bauer & Dow, 1994). We model a simple event using small replicas of real-world objects and encourage infants to imitate what they have observed.…”

“…First, infants imitate spontaneously and do not need instructions to do so. Second, infants treat realistic little models as representations of real-world objects and understand familiar activities modeled with objects as representing real-world events (Mandler & McDonough, 1998b;McDonough & Mandler, 1998). At first glance, this may seem surprising in 1-year-old infants, but it reflects the same capacity that is manifested in recognizing pictures and that a few months later is expressed in symbolic play.…”

The Human First Hypothesis: Identification of Conspecifics and Individuation of Objects in the Young Infant

“…For example, not only can they discriminate animate objects from inanimate ones (e.g., Meltzoff, 1995;Spelke, Phillips, & Woodward, 1995), or animals from artifacts (e.g., Mandler & McDonough, 1993, or intentional objects from nonintentional objects (Csibra, Gergely, Biro, Koos, & Brockbank, 1999), but they can also apply different psychological principles to the objects of such classes. They form specific expectations of what an animal, or an intentional object, can and cannot do and of what they can do with it (e.g., Csibra et al, 1999;Mandler & McDonough, 1998;Premack, 1990;Premack & Premack, 1995a, 1995bPremack & Premack, 1997;Woodward, 1998;Woodward & Sommerville, 2000). In short, it seems that infants are equipped with all of the necessary cognitive mechanisms for applying the property method at least to humans, animals, and objects.…”