Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology, Emory University, United States;2. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, United States;3. New York State Psychiatric Institute, United States;1. Department of Psychology, The College of Staten Island, The City University of New York, 2800 Victory Blvd., 4S-108, SI, NY, 10314, United States;2. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, United States;3. Department of Mathematics, The College of Staten Island, The City University of New York, 2800 Victory Blvd., SI, NY, 10314, United States;1. Clinical Child & Family Studies, Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands;2. Department of Education, The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel;3. Department of Psychology, Education, and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands;4. Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands;5. SEED Center, School of Behavior Sciences, Academic College Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel;1. Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA;2. Department of Psychology, Williams College, Williams, MA, USA;3. Department of Pediatrics, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY, USA;4. Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY, USA;5. Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY, USA;6. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, USA |
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| Abstract: | The ability to determine how many objects are involved in physical events is fundamental for reasoning about the world that surrounds us. Previous studies suggest that infants can fail to individuate objects in ambiguous occlusion events until their first birthday and that learning words for the objects may play a crucial role in the development of this ability. The present eye-tracking study tested whether the classical object individuation experiments underestimate young infants’ ability to individuate objects and the role word learning plays in this process. Three groups of 6-month-old infants (N = 72) saw two opaque boxes side by side on the eye-tracker screen so that the content of the boxes was not visible. During a familiarization phase, two visually identical objects emerged sequentially from one box and two visually different objects from the other box. For one group of infants the familiarization was silent (Visual Only condition). For a second group of infants the objects were accompanied with nonsense words so that objects’ shape and linguistic labels indicated the same number of objects in the two boxes (Visual & Language condition). For the third group of infants, objects’ shape and linguistic labels were in conflict (Visual vs. Language condition). Following the familiarization, it was revealed that both boxes contained the same number of objects (e.g. one or two). In the Visual Only condition, infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects at test, showing that they could individuate objects using visual cues alone. In the Visual & Language condition infants showed the same looking pattern. However, in the Visual vs Language condition infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects according to linguistic labels. The results show that infants can individuate objects in a complex object individuation paradigm considerably earlier than previously thought and that linguistic cues enforce their own preference in object individuation. The results are consistent with the idea that when language and visual information are in conflict, language can exert an influence on how young infants reason about the visual world. |
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| Keywords: | Object individuation Object labelling Cognitive development Language development |
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