Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy

Abstract

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented. With this aim, we used a visual associative learning procedure inspired by the contextual cuing paradigm, with infants from 8 to 12 months of age. In two experiments, in which we varied the complexity of the stimuli, we first habituated infants to several scenes where the location of a target (a cartoon character) was consistently associated with a context, namely a specific configuration of geometrical shapes. Second, we examined whether infants learned the covariation between the target location and the context by measuring looking times at scenes that either respected or violated the association. In both experiments, results showed that infants learned the target-context associations, as they looked longer at the familiar scenes than at the novel ones. In particular, infants selected clusters of co-occurring contextual shapes and learned the covariation between the target location and this subset. These results support the existence of a powerful and versatile statistical learning mechanism that may influence the orientation of infants' visual attention toward areas of interest in their environment during early developmental stages. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hm1unyLBn0.

Top‐down contextual knowledge guides visual attention in infancy

“…For example, rather than storing visual contextual information in extensive detail, infants may encode salient features or subsets of features to use as cues (see Brady & Chun, ; Brockmole, Castelhano, & Henderson, for work on local vs. global contextual cueing in adults). In their experiment on target and spatial location associations, Bertels and colleagues () found significant correlations among the distances of certain distracters from the target and the size of infants’ familiarity preference for repeated arrays, which they took as evidence of more local or feature‐based learning. The demands placed on attention and memory systems are likely to impact infants’ performance on search tasks involving more complex or conflicting elements (e.g., Gerhardstein & Rovee‐Collier, ; Scerif, Cornish, Wilding, Driver, & Karmiloff‐Smith, ).…”

“…Three‐month‐old infants use spatiotemporal regularities to facilitate attention to upcoming visual events, and by 8 months, they show evidence of orienting to predictive, rather than non‐predictive, spatial cues (Kirkham, Slemmer, Richardson, & Johnson, ; Tummeltshammer & Kirkham, ; Tummeltshammer, Mareschal, & Kirkham, ; Wentworth, Haith, & Hood, ). Recent work has demonstrated that older infants are sensitive to covariation between a target location and the spatial configuration of non‐target elements, looking longer when targets appeared in familiar locations compared to novel locations (Bertels, San Anton, Gebuis, & Destrebecqz, ).…”

Meaning in learning: Contextual cueing relies on objects’ visual features and not on objects’ meaning

“…For instance, scene-based CC is believed to rely on explicit memory and the global properties of the display (Brockmole et al, 2006;Brockmole & Henderson, 2006a, 2006bBrockmole & Vo, 2010), whereas array-based CC relies on implicit memory (Chun & Jiang, 2003;Colagiuri & Livesey, 2016; but see Vadillo, Konstantinidis, & Shanks, 2016) and the local elements of the display (e.g., Brady & Chun, 2007). Array-based CC is also considered to be a fundamental type of learning, as it was observed in infants (Bertels, San Anton, Gebuis, & Destrebecqz, 2016), nonhuman primates (Goujon & Fagot, 2013), and even birds (Gibson, Leber, & Mehlman, 2015). Thus, it is important to examine whether semantics (in this case, the meaning of the distractors) is a key factor not only in scene-based CC but also in arraybased CC.…”

Differential Effects of Salient Visual Events on Memory‐Guided Attention in Adults and Children

“…Some work suggests that the mechanisms that enable memories to guide attention may emerge as early as infancy. Infants as young as 8 months can learn to associate specific contexts with the location of a hidden target (Bertels, San Anton, Gebuis, & Destrebecqz, ) and can use these associations to guide search for targets hidden in simple arrays (Tummeltshammer & Amso, ). These effects may persist into childhood, with children as young as 5 years old demonstrating effects of memories on attention (Dixon et al., ).…”