Comparison affects object representation by five-month-olds in physical events

• In Event: 2-031 - New advances in the study of object representations in infancy: Formation, structure, and content

Integrative Statement

The use of object information relevant to the task at hand is crucial for young children to interact effectively with the physical world and bears close connections with early spatial learning. Past research has converged to show stronger representation of object height when infants watch occlusion than containment events—a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. On the contrary, no difference was observed for object width. For example, infants at 3.5 months noticed occlusion events that violated the rule of height and detected changes to object height in occlusion events, but failed to do so in containment events until about 7.5 months. In contrast, infants at 4 months succeeded in detecting width violations across occlusion and containment events.

Previous research rarely considered contextual support jointly with rule learning as a multi-faceted process for object representation in infancy. The present experiment fills the gap by considering the relative roles of these two mechanisms. Specifically, while taking into account the approximate age by which infants acquire and robustly apply a physical rule, we examined ways in which object representation can be affected by contextual support for comparison via spatial alignment.

Five-month-old infants were assigned to an occlusion or a containment condition and watched two test events wherein an object was glided behind or inside a container that opened on the right side. The size of the object changed in one test event and stayed the same in the other. For half of the infants, the object was held vertically (Figure 1), providing spatial alignment between the object and container along the target variable height. For the other half, the object was held horizontally (Figure 2), providing no alignment along the target variable width. We expected the alignment to enhance infants’ inclusion of height information in their representations for both occlusion and containment conditions, whereas the lack of alignment should make it challenging for infants to include width information in their representations.

As predicted, the vertical group looked significantly longer at the change than the no-change event in the occlusion condition, F(1, 30) = 21.85, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.05, and the containment condition, F(1, 30) = 7.06, p = .013, d = 0.50. In contrast, the horizontal group only detected the change in the occlusion condition, F(1, 30) = 17.16, p < .001, d = 1.10; those in the containment condition looked about equally at the two events, F(1, 30) = 1.05, p = .313. The results supported the idea that spatial alignment for comparison enhanced infants’ inclusion of height information in their representations before they acquired the rule, whereas its absence negatively affected the representations.
These findings suggest that beside rule learning, contextual support for comparison plays a crucial role in the development of object representation in infancy. The process of comparison (e.g., via spatial alignment) and that of rule learning jointly determine the content and robustness of early object representation.

Authors

• Su-hua Wang, University of California Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Goldman, University of California Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author