Young children use pedagogical cues as a signal that others' actions are social or cultural conventions. Here we show that children selectively "transmit" (enact in a new social situation) causal functions demonstrated pedagogically, even when they have learned and can produce alternative functions as well. Two-year-olds saw two novel…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

This study explored 14-month-old infants' ability to form novel word-spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., "teek") while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., "blick") while viewing dynamic support events (i.e.,…

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Two experiments explored how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., on) when habituated to few (i.e., 2) or many (i.e., 6) examples of the relation. When habituated to 2 pairs of objects in a support relation, 14-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds, formed the abstract spatial category (i.e., generalized the…