Evidence for mental subdivision of space by infants: 3- to 4-month-olds spontaneously bisect a small-scale area into left and right categories

Abstract

Young infants have been shown to represent the left versus right spatial category relations of a target object and a vertical referent bar. In the present study, we examined whether infants would represent left versus right when the vertical bar was removed from the stimulus display. In Experiment 1, 3-to 4-month-olds who had been familiarized with stimuli depicting a diamond appearing in different locations to the left or right of the vertical midline displayed a mean novel category preference for a stimulus depicting the diamond on the opposite side of the midline. In Experiment 2, another group of 3-to 4-month-olds discriminated the withincategory position changes of the diamond as it appeared to the left or right of the vertical midline. The results indicate that young infants can mentally bisect small-scale space into left versus right categories.

Spatial and featural cue weighting in children’s developing object representations

“…Moreover, newborns discriminate colors (Adams, 1987;Adams & Courage, 1998) and shapes (Quinn, Slater, Brown, & Hayes, 2001;Turati, Simion, & Zanon, 2003), as well as demonstrate shape constancy across changes in orientation (Slater & Morison, 1987). By 6 months of age, infants are able to subdivide a space into left and right regions without a relational landmark (Quinn, 2012) and, within a large sandbox, they detect differences in an object's location by as little as 8 inches (Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999). Moreover, 6-month-olds exhibit adult-like category boundaries when discriminating colors (Bornstein, Kessen, & Weiskopf, 1976) and form shape categories from as few as three exemplars (Ayzenberg & Lourenco, 2019;Bomba & Siqueland, 1983;Quinn et al, 2001).…”

The relations among navigation, object analysis, and magnitude perception in children: Evidence for a network of Euclidean geometry

“…Moreover, children are capable of using wall length to reorient in a fragmented space when the positions of the walls do not generate ambiguous global shape information (Yousif & Lourenco, 2017). Similarly, infants have been shown to use direction (i.e., left and right) and distance cues to categorize objects in visual attention paradigms (Gava, Valenza, & Turati, 2009;Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999;Quinn, 2012). And although 4-year-olds have more difficulty using distance and direction cues to distinguish object forms than they do length and angle, they are nevertheless able to use all of these cues at above chance levels (Dehaene et al, 2006;Izard & Spelke, 2009).…”