It Clicks When It Is Rolled and It Squeaks When It Is Squeezed: What 10‐Month‐Old Infants Learn About Object Function

Abstract

Function has been considered important in numerous literatures in the study of cognitive development, yet little is known about what and how infants learn about function. Five experiments examined what 10-month-old infants (N=80) learn about functions that involve a sound produced when an object is acted on. Infants habituated to a single object (Experiment 1) or multiple objects that performed the same function (Experiment 2) learned both the actions and the sounds. Infants did not appear to learn relations between actions and sounds (Experiment 3) or appearances and sounds (Experiment 4), although they did learn the relations between appearances and actions (Experiment 5). These results are discussed in terms of how infants learn about object function.

Infants' Developing Sensitivity to Object Function: Attention to Features and Feature Correlations

“…Seven-month-old infants dishabituated to both kinds of changes but were more attentive to the actions (and the resulting sounds) than to the appearance of the objects. By 10 months, infants represent all these features-the actions performed on objects, the sound resulting from those actions, and the object appearance (Horst, Oakes, & Madole, 2005;Perone & Oakes, 2006). On the one hand, this might be taken as evidence that infants attended to function earlier in development than they did the physical properties of objects.…”

“…Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and sounds or actions and sounds. In this article the authors probed the development of infants' attention to feature correlations critical for representing function by testing 8-and 12-month-old infants' (N ¼ 126) sensitivity to such relations.…”

“…We addressed these questions using the events that have been previously used to investigate infants' emerging attention to, categorization based on, and conceptions of object function (Horst et al, 2005;Perone et al, 2008;Perone & Oakes, 2006). In these events, a hand reaches for a stationary object, grasps that object, and performs some action on it (e.g., rolling it, squeezing it, or pulling a part of it).…”

“…Although by 10 months infants encoded multiple individual features that comprise function, they recognized only associations between actions and particular objects (e.g., purple objects can be rolled); they were insensitive to associations between actions and resulting sounds (e.g., squeezing results in squeaking) or between objects and particular sounds (e.g., purple objects squeak; Perone & Oakes, 2006). Because function involves the combination of the action performed, the physical properties of the object, and the consequence of acting on the object, these combined results suggest that infants do not perceive function as a single unified object feature.…”

“…Function has been referred to in terms of the affordances for action or use of an object (e.g., handles are meant to be grasped; Gibson, 1988), an actor's goal of acting on an object (e.g., a telephone is used to call someone; Buxbaum & Saffran, 2002), and actions on objects that produce a particular outcome (e.g., an object squeaks when it is squeezed; Perone & Oakes, 2006).…”