4.5-month-old infants’ learning, retention and use of object boundary information

Abstract

4.5-month-old infants can use information learned from prior experience with objects to help determine the boundaries of objects in a complex visual scene (Needham, 1998; Needham, Dueker, & Lockhead, 2002). The present studies investigate the effect of delay (between prior experience and test) on infant use of such experiential knowledge. Results indicate that infants can use experience with an object to help them to parse a scene containing that object 24 (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 suggests that after 24 h infants have begun to forget some object attributes, and that this forgetting promotes generalization from one similar object to another. After a 72-h delay, infants did not show any beneficial effect of prior experience with one of the objects in the scene (Experiments 3A and B). However, prior experience with multiple objects, similar to an object in the scene, facilitated infant segregation of the scene 72 h later, suggesting that category information remains available in infant memory longer than experience with a single object. The results are discussed in terms of optimal infant benefit from prior experiences with objects.