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Six‐Month‐Old Infants' Categorization of Containment Spatial Relations
Author(s) -
Casasola Marianella,
Cohen Leslie B.,
Chiarello Elizabeth
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8624.00562
Subject(s) - containment (computer programming) , categorization , psychology , habituation , relation (database) , optimal distinctiveness theory , developmental psychology , categorical variable , object (grammar) , object permanence , representation (politics) , task (project management) , cognitive psychology , cognition , cognitive development , social psychology , artificial intelligence , statistics , mathematics , computer science , data mining , programming language , management , neuroscience , politics , political science , law , economics , psychotherapist
Six‐month‐old infants' ability to form an abstract category of containment was examined using a standard infant categorization task. Infants were habituated to 4 pairs of objects in a containment relation. Following habituation, infants were tested with a novel example of the familiar containment relation and an example of an unfamiliar relation. Results indicate that infants look reliably longer at the unfamiliar versus familiar relation, indicating that they can form a categorical representation of containment. A second experiment demonstrated that infants do not rely on object occlusion to discriminate containment from a support or a behind spatial relation. Together, the results indicate that by 6 months, infants can recognize a containment relation from different angles and across different pairs of objects.