What is the optimal penalty for errors in infant skill learning? Behavioral analyses indicate that errors are frequent but trivial as infants acquire foundational skills. In learning to walk, for example, falling is commonplace but appears to incur only a negligible penalty. Behavioral data, however, cannot reveal whether a low penalty for falling…

Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization. One is via a process of noting similarities shared by several examples. Alternatively, generalization may reflect an implicit desire to explain the input. The latter view suggests that generalization…

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We…

Previous research has established that infants are unable to perceive causality until 6 1/4 months of age. The current experiments examined whether infants' ability to engage in causal action could facilitate causal perception prior to this age. In Experiment 1, 4 1/2-month-olds were randomly assigned to engage in causal action experience via…

As with all culturally relevant human behaviours, words are meaningful because they are shared by the members of a community. This research investigates whether 9-month-old infants understand this fundamental fact about language. Experiment 1 examined whether infants who are trained on, and subsequently habituated to, a new word-referent link…

Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect…

Very few studies have examined the cognitive advantages of bilingualism during the first two years of development, and a majority of the studies examining bilingualism throughout the lifespan have focused on the relationship between multiple languages and cognitive control. Early experience with multiple language systems may influence…

Over the course of the first year of life, infants develop from being generalized listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts, into specialized listeners whose discrimination patterns closely reflect the phonetic system of the native language(s). Recent work by Maye, Werker and Gerken (2002) has proposed a…

The current work explored the conditions under which infants generalize spatial relationships from one event to another. English-learning 5-month-olds habituated to a tight- or loose-fit covering event dishabituated to a change in fit during a "containment" test event, but infants habituated to a visually similar "occlusion" event did not. Thus,…

In two experiments, we examined whether 14-month-olds understand the subjective nature of gaze. In the first experiment, infants first observed an experimenter express happiness as she looked inside a container that either contained a toy (reliable looker condition) or was empty (unreliable looker condition). Then, infants had to follow the same…

We examined the influence of prior exposure to specific animal properties on 15-month-old infants' inductive generalization. Using picture books, 29 infants were trained on properties linked in a congruent or incongruent manner with four animal categories. A generalized imitation task was then administered to assess patterns of property extension…

The present experiments investigate how young language learners begin to acquire form-based categories and the relationships between them. We investigated this question by exposing 12-month-olds to auditory structure of the form aX and bY (infants had to learn that a-elements grouped with Xs and not Ys). Infants were then tested on strings from…