TY - JOUR
T1 - The roles of item repetition and position in infants’ abstract rule learning
AU - Schonberg, Christina
AU - Marcus, Gary F.
AU - Johnson, Scott P.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NIH Grant R01-HD73535. We thank the research staff at the NYU Infant Perception Lab and the UCLA Baby Lab for assistance with recruitment and testing, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. We are especially grateful for the contributions to this research from our infant participants and their families. Portions of this work were presented at the 2017 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development and at the 2017 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2018/11
Y1 - 2018/11
N2 - We asked whether 11- and 14- month-old infants’ abstract rule learning, an early form of analogical reasoning, is susceptible to processing constraints imposed by limits in attention and memory for sequence position. We examined 11- and 14- month-old infants’ learning and generalization of abstract repetition rules (“repetition anywhere,” Experiment 1 or “medial repetition,” Experiment 2) and ordering of specific items (edge positions, Experiment 3) in 4-item sequences. Infants were habituated to sequences containing repetition- and/or position-based structure and then tested with “familiar” vs. “novel” (random) sequences composed of new items. Eleven-month-olds (N = 40) failed to learn abstract repetition rules, but 14-month-olds (N = 40) learned rules under both conditions. In Experiment 3, 11-month-olds (N = 20) learned item edge positions in sequences identical to those in Experiment 2. We conclude that infant sequence learning is constrained by item position in similar ways as in adults.
AB - We asked whether 11- and 14- month-old infants’ abstract rule learning, an early form of analogical reasoning, is susceptible to processing constraints imposed by limits in attention and memory for sequence position. We examined 11- and 14- month-old infants’ learning and generalization of abstract repetition rules (“repetition anywhere,” Experiment 1 or “medial repetition,” Experiment 2) and ordering of specific items (edge positions, Experiment 3) in 4-item sequences. Infants were habituated to sequences containing repetition- and/or position-based structure and then tested with “familiar” vs. “novel” (random) sequences composed of new items. Eleven-month-olds (N = 40) failed to learn abstract repetition rules, but 14-month-olds (N = 40) learned rules under both conditions. In Experiment 3, 11-month-olds (N = 20) learned item edge positions in sequences identical to those in Experiment 2. We conclude that infant sequence learning is constrained by item position in similar ways as in adults.
KW - Abstract rule learning
KW - Analogical reasoning
KW - Infant learning
KW - Perceptual primitives
KW - Sequence learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.08.003
DO - 10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.08.003
M3 - Article
C2 - 30262181
AN - SCOPUS:85053857104
SN - 0163-6383
VL - 53
SP - 64
EP - 80
JO - Infant Behavior and Development
JF - Infant Behavior and Development
ER -