Investigating the Relation Between Infants' Manual Activity With Objects and Their Perception of Dynamic Events

Abstract

We examined the relation between 6‐ and 7‐month‐old infants' (N = 60) manual activity with objects during free play and their perception of the features of dynamic, multimodal events. Infants were habituated to a single event in which a hand reached for and manipulated a colorful, multifeatured object, and a sound was heard (e.g., a hand squeezed a purple round object, causing a whistling sound) and then their response to events that involved a change in the appearance of the object, the action, or the sound was assessed. Infants responded least to changes in the appearance of the objects, and their sensitivity to this feature was related to their manual activity with objects during free play. Infants' responding to changes in the sound or action was unrelated to motor activity, suggesting that at this age motor achievements related to object exploration are associated with infants' perception of some, but not all, object features.

One is Not Enough: Multiple Exemplars Facilitate Infants' Generalizations of Novel Properties

“…Our finding that 11‐month‐olds familiarized with a single exemplar of a category failed to learn the animal–sound pairing or generalize the sound property is consistent with a growing body of research, demonstrating that infants younger than 12 months of age have difficulty learning multiple relations among features in dynamic events (Baumgartner & Oakes, , ; Perone & Oakes, ; Perone, Madole, Ross‐Sheehy, Carey, & Oakes, ; Perone, Madole, & Oakes, ). For example, when infants are asked to learn the relation between the appearance, action, and outcome of an action, research has revealed a developmental trend in infants' ability to form associations among these features.…”

Manual object exploration and learning about object features in human infants

“…Here, we report some results from a replication of Perone et al, evaluating the relationship between the quality of infants' activity with objects and their attention to the appearance of the objects in the dynamic audio-visual events. We have reported other results from this study elsewhere [17], but the main analyses reported here are unique.…”

“…We have reported in Baumgartner and Oakes [17] that as a group these infants learned the features of these stimuli. There were no effects of task order or whether or not infants could sit independently (according to parental report) on behavior during habituation or test.…”

“…As a group, infants dishabituated to all of the tests. Although these results were reported in Baumgartner and Oakes [17], to allow for a complete understanding of our data we provide here the results of our one-sample, two-tailed t-tests comparing infants' dishabituation scores to zero. As a group, these infants increased their looking to a change in appearance, t(59) = 3.64, p = .001, d = .47, a change in action, t(59) = 5.76, p < .001, d = .74, and a change in sound, t(59) = 5.58, p < .001, d = .72.…”

“…We focus here on two measures of the quality of infants' interaction that may lead to taskindependent learning-these behaviors may induce strategies that infants can use to direct their attention when learning about objects in other contexts [other measures are reported elsewhere, [17]. The first behavior was intentional touching, or contact with the object with one or two hands without lifting the object off the ground (i.e., touching a toy while waving one's hand and looking in the opposite direction would not be counted as touching, unless the infant turned to look at the toy while touching it).…”