At what age is an infant first likely to reach for a completely hidden object?
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Recent evidence indicates that infants as young as 3.5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when hidden (Baillargeon, 1987a; Baillargeon & DeVos, 1990). Why, then, do infants fail to search for hidden objects until 7 to 8 months of age? The present experiments tested whether 5.5-month-old infants could distinguish between correct and incorrect search actions performed by an experimenter. In Experiment 1, a toy was placed in front of (possible event) or under (impossible event) a clear cover. Next, a screen was slid in front of the objects, hiding them from view. A hand then reached behind the screen and reapeared holding the toy. The infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they understood that the hand's direct reaching action was sufficient to retrieve the toy when it stood in front of but not under the clear cover. The same results were obtained in a second condition in which a toy was placed in front of (possible event) or behind (impossible event) a barrier. In Experiment 2, a toy was placed under the right (possible event) or the left (impossible event) of two covers. After a screen hid the objects, a hand reached behind the screen's right edge and reappeared first with the right cover and then with the toy. The infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they realized that the hand's sequence of action was sufficient to retrieve the toy when it stood under the right but not the left cover. A control condition supported this interpretation. Together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that by 5.5 months of age, infants not only represent hidden objects, but are able to identify the actions necessary to retrieve these objects. The implications of these findings for a problem solving explanation of young infants' failure to retrieve hidden objects are considered. Show
References (42)
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Animals must learn to link sensory cues in the environment to actions that lead to reward or avoid punishment. Rapid learning can then be highly adaptive and the difference between life or death. To explore the neural dynamics and circuits that underlie learning, however, has typically required the use of laboratory paradigms with tight control of stimuli, action sets, and outcomes. Learning curves in such reward-based tasks are reported as slow and gradual, with animals often taking hundreds to thousands of trials to reach expert performance. The slow, highly variable, and incremental learning curve remains the largely unchallenged belief in modern systems neuroscience. Here, we provide historical and contemporary evidence that instrumental forms of reward-learning can be dissociated into two parallel processes: knowledge acquisition which is rapid with step-like improvements, and behavioral expression which is slower and more variable. We further propose that this conceptual distinction may allow us to isolate the associative (knowledge-related) and non-associative (performance-related) components that influence learning. We then discuss the implications that this revised understanding of the learning curve has for systems neuroscience. 2015, Cognition Citation Excerpt : Evaluating such actions requires them to be parsed in order to perceive overall syntax and ultimately their goal (Baldwin, Baird, Saylor, & Clark, 2001; Conway & Christiansen, 2001; Lewkowicz, 2004). VOE studies report that around the age of 6 months infants start to evaluate the efficiency of sequential actions (Biro, Verschoor, & Coenen, 2011; Csibra, 2008; Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Verschoor & Biro, 2012) and causality towards their goals (Baillargeon, Graber, DeVos, & Black, 1990; Woodward & Sommerville, 2000). Olofson and Baldwin (2011) found that 10-month-olds take into account the kinematics of an observed reaching motion to judge whether it is part of a familiar action sequence. Show abstractNavigate Down Nine-month-olds start to perform sequential actions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how they acquire and control such actions. We studied infants’ sequential-action control by employing a novel gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm. Infants experienced occulo-motor action sequences comprising two elementary actions. To contrast chaining, concurrent and integrated models of sequential-action control, we then selectively activated secondary actions to assess interactions with the primary actions. Behavioral and pupillometric results suggest 12-month-olds acquire sequential action without elaborate strategy through exploration. Furthermore, the inhibitory mechanisms ensuring ordered performance develop between 9 and 12 months of age, and are best captured by concurrent models. 2013, Cognitive Development Show abstractNavigate Down Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds’ understanding of collision events using a forced-choice paradigm with reduced prediction demands. Although the group as a whole performed at chance level, when the preschoolers were subdivided into three age groups, the oldest group performed above chance level. These findings suggest that it is unlikely to be prediction skills that affect young preschoolers’ performance on physical reasoning tasks. The findings lend support to a task-demand hypothesis, which proposes that discontinuities in developmental trajectories can be explained by differences in the extent to which cognitive processes are required by the different tasks. 2012, Behavioural Processes Citation Excerpt : Two classes of explanations have been proposed to explain action/perception mismatches contending either conceptual continuity or discontinuity over development (Santos et al., 2006). Continuity explanations propose that children fail to act correctly not because they lack correct knowledge but because they are limited in their motor capacities (Diamond, 1991; Baillargeon et al., 1990; Hood and Willats, 1986; Keen, 2003; Munakata et al., 1997). In the case of marmosets, this explanation seems not sufficient. Show abstractNavigate Down Perception-based measures often reveal much earlier competencies than action-based approaches. We explored this phenomenon generally labeled as “knowledge dissociation” in 28 common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) using a paradigm where subjects had to localize a food item dropped down an opaque tube. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed common marmoset monkeys’ gravity bias in an action based version of the tubes task. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether marmosets’ performance increases in an action-free task context where they simply look at objects falling down a tube. The results suggest that common marmosets have some intuition of continuity/solidity constraints when tested with perception based measures even though these principles do not appear to guide their search for falling objects. 2009, Cognitive Psychology Show abstractNavigate Down The present research examined whether 5- to 6.5-month-old infants would hold different expectations about various physical events involving a box after receiving evidence that it was either inert or self-propelled. Infants were surprised if the inert but not the self-propelled box: reversed direction spontaneously (Experiment 1); remained stationary when hit or pulled (Experiments 3 and 3A); remained stable when released in midair or with inadequate support from a platform (Experiment 4); or disappeared when briefly hidden by one of two adjacent screens (the second screen provided the self-propelled box with an alternative hiding place; Experiment 5). On the other hand, infants were surprised if the inert or the self-propelled box appeared to pass through an obstacle (Experiment 2) or disappeared when briefly hidden by a single screen (Experiment 5). The present results indicate that infants as young as 5 months of age distinguish between inert and self-propelled objects and hold different expectations for physical events involving these objects, even when incidental differences between the objects are controlled. These findings are consistent with the proposal by Gelman, R. (1990). First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant data: Number and the animate–inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science, 14, 79–106, Leslie, A. M. (1994). ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 119–148). New York: Cambridge University Press, and others that infants endow self-propelled objects with an internal source of energy. Possible links between infants’ concepts of self-propelled object, agent, and animal are also discussed. 2010, Developmental Psychology Research article Developmental Review, Volume 38, 2015, pp. 122-145 Show abstractNavigate Down Distinct layers of awareness about objects, people, and the self grow from an implicit biologically given core at birth. Each added layer of subjective experience would correspond to major qualitative shifts: the emergence of a contemplative stance by 2 months, self-consciousness from around 21 months and the manifestation of an ethical stance by 3–5 years. This new “onion” way of looking at psychological experience is meant to capture the fact that a new emerging layer of awareness does not block, re-construct, or fundamentally re-structure “à la Piaget” the expression of those ontogenetically anterior via bounding up equilibration and other reflective abstraction “bootstrapping” mechanisms. In contrast to Piaget's overall representational re-organization, what is proposed here with the onion metaphor model is a multilayer view on consciousness in development, each layer offering a particular zone of awareness through which we constantly navigate depending on the mind state of our being in the world: dozing and dreaming, implicitly or explicitly aware, co-aware, conscious, or co-conscious. The model is illustrated using facts on the early development of pictorial understanding, mirror self-experience, self-consciousness, interpersonal awareness, and sharing awareness in development. The main purpose of the theory is to show that what develop in children between birth and 5 years are ultimately additional ranges of subjective experience, new possibilities of being aware in the world. Research article Neuropsychologia, Volume 104, 2017, pp. 113-125 Show abstractNavigate Down Recent work has suggested a potential link between the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting the retrieval of events and thematic associations (i.e., knowledge about how concepts relate in a meaningful context) and semantic control processes that support the capacity to shape retrieval to suit the circumstances. Thematic associations and events are inherently flexible: the meaning of an item changes depending on the context (for example, lamp goes with reading, bicycle and police). Control processes might stabilise weak yet currently-relevant interpretations during event understanding. In contrast, semantic retrieval for objects (to understand what items are, and the categories they belong to) is potentially constrained by sensory-motor features (e.g., bright light) that change less across contexts. Semantic control and event understanding produce overlapping patterns of activation in healthy participants in left prefrontal and temporoparietal regions, but the potential causal link between these aspects of semantic cognition has not been examined. We predict that event understanding relies on semantic control, due to associations being necessarily context-dependent and variable. We tested this hypothesis in two ways: (i) by examining thematic associations and object identity in patients with semantic aphasia, who have well-documented deficits of semantic control following left frontoparietal stroke and (ii) using the same tasks in healthy controls under dual-task conditions that depleted the capacity for cognitive control. The patients were impaired on both identity and thematic matching tasks, and they showed particular difficulty on non-dominant thematic associations which required greater control over semantic retrieval. Healthy participants showed the same pattern under conditions of divided attention. These findings support the view that semantic control is necessary for organising and constraining the retrieval of thematic associations. Research article NeuroImage, Volume 185, 2019, pp. 947-954 Show abstractNavigate Down Motor theories of action prediction propose that our motor system combines prior knowledge with incoming sensory input to predict other people's actions. This prior knowledge can be acquired through observational experience, with statistical learning being one candidate mechanism. But can knowledge learned through observation alone transfer into predictions generated in the motor system? To examine this question, we first trained infants at home with videos of an unfamiliar action sequence featuring statistical regularities. At test, motor activity was measured using EEG and compared during perceptually identical time windows within the sequence that preceded actions which were either predictable (deterministic) or not predictable (random). Findings revealed increased motor activity preceding the deterministic but not the random actions, providing the first evidence that the infant motor system can use knowledge from statistical learning to predict upcoming actions. As such, these results support theories in which the motor system underlies action prediction. Research article Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Volume 79, 2017, pp. 77-84 Show abstractNavigate Down The results of behavioral experiments typically exhibit inconsistent connectedness, i.e., they violate the condition known as “no-signaling,” “no-disturbance,” or “marginal selectivity.” This prevents one from evaluating these experiments in terms of quantum contextuality if the latter understood traditionally (as, e.g., in the Kochen–Specker theorem or Bell-type inequalities). The Contextuality-by-Default (CbD) theory separates contextuality from inconsistent connectedness. When applied to quantum physical experiments that exhibit inconsistent connectedness (due to context-dependent errors and/or signaling), the CbD computations reveal quantum contextuality in spite of this. When applied to a large body of published behavioral experiments, the CbD computations reveal no quantum contextuality: all context-dependence in these experiments is described by inconsistent connectedness alone. Until recently, however, experimental analysis of contextuality was confined to so-called cyclic systems of binary random variables. Here, we present the results of a psychophysical double-detection experiment that do not form a cyclic system: their analysis requires that we use a recent modification of CbD, one that makes the class of noncontextual systems more restricted. Nevertheless our results once again indicate that when inconsistent connectedness is taken into account, the system exhibits no contextuality. Research article Cognitive Development, Volume 54, 2020, Article 100869 Show abstractNavigate Down The aim of this study was to investigate whether children’s theory of mind performance would differ according to the group membership of the mental inference target. Eighty 3- to 5-year-old children were administered standard theory of mind measures (diverse desires, false belief, and real-apparent emotion tasks) with either an ingroup or an outgroup target. The false belief performance of older 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds and younger 4-year-olds, was worse (a) with an ingroup than an outgroup target if they demonstrated high ingroup affiliation and (b) when they affiliated with the target, regardless of target group membership. Children’s performance in the diverse desires and real-apparent emotion tasks did not differ according to target group membership and children’s affiliation with the target. Overall, our results suggest that affiliation with the target could potentially undermine older preschoolers’ understanding that the target can hold a belief that deviates from one’s own belief. Research article Infant Behavior and Development, Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 349-358 Show abstractNavigate Down Infants’ learn a great deal about the physical world during the first year of life. There is a growing body of research investigating the conditions under which this is most likely to occur. Most of this research has focused on the type of information that infants are presented. The current research moves the field in a new direction by investigating the extent to which the social context – who presents the information to the infant – influences knowledge acquisition. Infants were first presented with a color-priming event in a non-social context (Experiment 1) or a social context (Experiment 2). These two contexts differed primarily in whether the individual presenting the color-priming events was behind the apparatus and hidden from view or sat next to the infant and was visible, respectively. The extent to which viewing the color priming events increased infants’ sensitivity to color differences in a subsequent object individuation task was then assessed. The results revealed that whereas 8.5-month-olds experienced color priming in the non-social context, 7.5-month-olds only experienced color priming within a social context. Furthermore, the 7.5-month-olds evidenced priming only when their own parent, not an unfamiliar adult, was the social partner performing the priming events. This provides new evidence for the significance of infant learning within a social context and the potential role of parents. ☆ This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-21104) to Renée Baillargeon. We thank Jerry DeJong, Judy Deloache, Paul Harris, and Brian Ross for helpful suggestions, and the undergraduate students working in the Infant Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois for their help with the data collection. We also thank the parents who kindly agreed to have their infants participate in the studies. Reprint requests should be sent to Renée Baillargeon, Psychology Department, University of Illinois, 603 East Daniel, Champaign, IL 61820, U.S.A. At what age can a baby locate an object hidden from view?8 to 9 months: Looks for hidden objects.
If your baby sees you hide an object, he'll now understand that it's not gone for good and will try to search for it. By 12 months: By the time he celebrates his first birthday, your little one will be able to easily find objects he sees you hide.
When can infants usually reach for objects?Your baby should be reaching for familiar objects by month 4, although some infants may begin reaching — for toys, for the dog and, of course, for their caregivers — by month 3. Soon after your baby masters reaching, you can also expect her to start grabbing objects.
Can a 3 month old reach for objects?3-Month-Old Baby Milestone #2: Baby Should Start Reaching for and Grabbing Things. At 3-months-old, the spark of play is lit. Babies should be able to reach and grasp for things they are curious about, and may start to explore cause-and-effect by bopping things that make noise when grasped or jostled.
At what age may a child demonstrate object permanence by looking for a hidden object such as when playing peek a boo?Peek-a-boo is a game that helps develop object permanence, which is part of early learning. Object permanence is an understanding that objects and events continue to exist, even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched. Most infants develop this concept between 6 months and a year old.
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