The ability to generalize previous knowledge to new contexts is a key aspect of human cognition and relational learning. A well-known learning maxim is that breadth of training predicts "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." When examples vary in their surface features, this provides evidence that only the common relational…

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes this era as a time of "liquid modernity." Rather than settled meanings, categories, and frames of reference, Bauman contends that meaning is always in flux, open-ended rather than closed. This flux is in large part driven and exacerbated by a culture of consumerism. This phenomenology of the…

A series of studies investigated the development of infants' understanding of the containment function of certain objects. In Experiment 1, infants' absolute preference for looking at either a can or a tube was tested. No preference was found. Two measures were used in Experiments 2 and 3. One assessed infants' looking response or gaze behavior…

The role of variation as a determinant of infant categorical responding was investigated in three studies of infants 7 to 7 1/2 months of age. Sixty-three infants, divided into groups of 21 each, were habituated to color slide poses of either one, two, or six different adult female faces. Their responses to a novel pose of a familiar face and a…

Infants' visual perception of number change was investigated in three studies. These studies focused on infants' perception of events in which the total number of objects in a small group was changed through addition of another object. Involving 60 infants 5 months of age, Study I attempted to determine whether subjects perceived the properties in…

A total of 60 infants of 7 weeks of age were tested in a habituation-dishabituation looking procedure to determine if they could discriminate between infant-directed talk (IDT) and adult-directed talk (ADT) uttered by the same speaker. One group of 12 infants was habituated to a female speaker's ADT and dishabituated to the same speaker's IDT,…

A series of studies has investigated the possibility that human infants performing tasks exhibit something like the P300, a positive-going brain wave associated with task performance and the updating of working memory among adults. Findings indicate that, when infants have the opportunity to form a template against which to compare a previously…

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information such as temporal synchrony to learn arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infants learned the relations between spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and two moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. Two experiments examined infants' memory for these relations. In…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…