Feature or location? Infants and adults adopt different strategies to search for a hidden toy in an ambiguous task

Abstract

15 16Evidence suggests that infants and adults attribute different importance to certain object 17 properties when performing object-directed actions. Namely, infants tend to rely on 18 information about an object's location, whereas adults are more likely to base their actions on 19 its features. In this study, we tested whether the strategic choices of infants (aged 13 months) 20 and adults would be modified by the context of the demonstration. Participants watched as an 21 experimenter hid a ball under one of two different coloured containers, using either a 22 communicative or a non-communicative manner. Then, the locations of the two containers 23were changed out of sight of the participant. During the test, participants were encouraged to 24 look for the ball under one of the containers. We found that adults were more likely to follow 25 a feature-based strategy than infants. However, there was no effect of the context of the 26 demonstration, suggesting that communication may play different roles in encoding object 27 properties and directing overt behaviour. 28 29

Eye Contact Affects Object Representation in 9-Month-Old Infants

“…We show that in a social context with eye contact, 9-month-old infants preferentially processed an object’s identity but not its location, clarifying that eye contact shaped the infants’ representations of novel objects. Regarding the object’s location and identity processing, previous research with infants under 1 year of age has shown that since they might have difficulty integrating the two processes with object representations, they tend to rely on information about an object’s location rather than its identity [ 25 , 26 ]. Nevertheless, the 9-month-olds in our study processed object identity in a social context with eye contact.…”

“…Previous research has shown that spatiotemporal location has primacy over identifying features when infants process information about objects (e.g., [ 22 – 24 ]). Especially for infants under 1 year of age, since they might have difficulty integrating the two processes with object representations, they tend to rely on information about an object’s location rather than its identity [ 25 , 26 ]. After 1 year of age, they can use featural information to individuate objects [ 27 , 28 ], manifesting functional integration between object identity and object localization processing.…”

Shape But Not Color Facilitates Two‐Year‐Olds’ Search Performance in a Spatial Rotation Task

“…When 22‐month‐old children observed that an object was hidden beneath one of four containers that were placed in a rectangle around them in the room, and children were thereafter rotated with covered eyes, they benefitted in their search when containers were visually discriminable (i.e., different colors and different stickers) as well, and found the objects more often than children in the control condition with identical containers (Garrad‐Cole, Lew, Bremner, & Whitaker, ). Nevertheless, young infants appear to use less object features in their spatial search than older children or adults and rely instead more strongly on spatial cues, such as the initial location of the hidden object (Haun et al., ; Oláh, Kupán, Csík, Király, & Topál, ).…”