Infant search errors: stage of concept development or stage of memory development.

Abstract

An 8-to-I2-month-old infant, having found an object hidden at a first location (A), will fre­ quently continue to search at the A location when the object is moved, in full view of the infant, to a second location (B) and hidden there. In Piaget's (1954)theory of the way in which children acquire knowledge of the external world through actions, the occurrence of such AS(or Stage IV) search errors is considered to provide critical evidence that such infants are egocentrically con­ cerned with their own actions and do not yet appreciate the systematic nature of spatial rela­ tionships or the permanence of objects. The present research, however, casts serious doubt upon the considerable theoretical significance that has been attached to the AB error by demonstrat­ ing that it occurs primarily as an artifact of the almost universally employe.!! two-choice hiding task, which constrains all search errors made during B-hiding trials to be AB errors. In two ex­ periments using less constrained hiding tasks, infants demonstrated no tendency to search in­ correctly at the A location during B-hiding trials, and they produced a pattern of errors sup­ portive of the notion that search errors result from a memory problem rather than from a con­ ceptual one. A memory explanation is proposed to account for the present results as well as for search errors made throughout the sensorimotor period of development. In nearly every area of psychology, the errors subjects make when performing different types of tasks are used to make inferences concerning possible underlying processes or structures. In the study of infants, the errors they make while searching for hidden objects have served-since Piaget's (1954) original observations­ as a rich data source for making inferences about the cognitive development of children. One of the more intriguing and better known errors studied by Piaget (1954) and others is the so-called