3-132 - Beyond the Beginnings: How and When Infants Generalize Knowledge Across Domains

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Infants acquire knowledge about the world extremely early in life. In order to function in a complex environment, however, mere one-to-one mapping of learned information is insufficient. Instead, infants must be able to generalize gained knowledge appropriately. This symposium addresses how and when infants generalize knowledge across the domains of categorization, relative preferences, and functional tool-use.

In the first paper, 11-month-olds but not 9-month-olds infants generalized properties of a novel animal category after they viewed multiple exemplars. In second paper, 14-month-olds generalized an actor’s preference for tall objects to novel objects, but 11-month-olds only did so if they were first acted on objects themselves. In the third paper, 18-month-olds recognized when a puppet had the same preferences as themselves and applied this information to novel toys acted on by the puppet. In the final study, infants who viewed flexible demonstrations of tool-use, indicating multiple ways to grasp the tool, were more likely to discover the solution to problems with the novel tools (after making errors) than infants who saw less flexible demonstrations.

Together, this research demonstrates a developmental trajectory of generalization across a variety of domains. It suggests that infants’ ability to generalize knowledge is dependent on a variety of factors, including age, number and types of exemplars viewed, and active experience with the actions. Further, the different paradigms used across experiments suggest a pervasive ability to generalize information about people and objects in the first year and a half of life.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Sarah A Gerson, University of St. Andrews

Individual Presentations

• Multiple exemplars facilitate infants’ generalization of novel properties in an induction task - Presenting Author: Ena Vukatana, University of Calgary; Susan A Graham, Univ of Calgary; Suzanne Curtin, University of Calgary; Michelle Zepeda, University of Calgary

• Eleven- and 14-Month-Old Infants Generalize A Person’s Choice of Objects Based on Relational Similarity Between Examples - Presenting Author: Shinchieh CJ Duh, San Jose State Univ; Su-hua Wang, Univ of California

• Like it or not?: Generalization of matched preferences between self and other to novel toys in 18-month-olds - Presenting Author: Sarah A Gerson, University of St. Andrews; Harold Bekkering, Radboud University Nijmegen; Sabine Hunnius, University of Nijmegen

• Generalization and error correction in infant tool use - Presenting Author: Jane Hirtle, Vanderbilt University; Amy Needham, Vanderbilt University