Can infants be “taught” to attend to a new physical variable in an event category? The case of height in covering events

Abstract

As they observe or produce events, infants identify variables that help them predict outcomes in each category of events. How do infants identify a new variable? An explanation-based learning (EBL) account suggests three essential steps: (1) observing contrastive outcomes relevant to the variable; (2) discovering the conditions associated with these outcomes; and (3) generating an explanation for the condition-outcome regularity discovered. In Experiments 1-3, 9-month-old infants watched events designed to "teach" them the variable height in covering events. After watching these events, designed in accord with the EBL account, the infants detected a height violation in a covering event, three months earlier than they ordinarily would have. In Experiments 4-6, the "teaching" events were modified to remove one of the EBL steps, and the infants no longer detected the height violation. The present findings thus support the EBL account and help specify the processes by which infants acquire their physical knowledge.

Detecting impossible changes in infancy: a three-system account

“…Middle row: In this event, the cover is lowered over the toy, to produce a covering event. Because height is not identified as a covering variable until ~12 months [15,43], 11-month-olds now fail to detect the change to the height of the toy, but 12.5-month-olds succeed in doing so. Bottom row: In this event, the cover is replaced with a tube (identical to the cover with its top removed), which is lowered over the toy.…”

“…From that point on, information about the variable (e.g. height) is regularly included when representing events from the category, as demonstrated by the successful performance of infants in violation-of-expectation and action tasks involving the variable [43,44]. If information about all variables were included from the start for all events, infants would have an impossible task of sorting through all of this information.…”

“…Why does it not simply use the rich representations formed by the object-representation system? One possible answer has to do with learning [14,43,44]. When faced with unexplained contrastive outcomes in an event category (e.g.…”

“…if the cover is lowered over the toy, infants categorize the event as a covering event; if the cover is lowered in front of the toy, they categorize it as an occlusion event). Infants then tap their knowledge of the event category selected, which lists the variables that have been identified as relevant for predicting outcomes in the category [38][39][40][41][42] (for a description of how variables are identified, see Refs [43,44]). A variable both calls infants' attention to a certain type of information in an event, and provides a causal rule for interpreting this information.…”

“…The spatiotemporal information specifies how many objects are involved in the event, and how their arrangement changes as the event unfolds. The identity information provides categorical or ontological information about each object, such as whether it is self-or nonself-propelled [31,32] 43,44]). A variable both calls infants' attention to a certain type of information in an event, and provides a causal rule for interpreting this information.…”