Infants' object examining: Habituation and categorization

Abstract

The visual habituation paradigm has dominated the study of infant object discrimination and categorization. A more active task, object examining, was used in two studies to explore early discrimination and categorization, and to validate previous findings. The object-examining task combined active exploration of real objects with some aspects of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm. The first study explored simple discrimination. Six- and 10-month-old infants were familiarized with a single object and then tested with two novel objects. The results indicated that at both ages, infants showed clear discrimination among objects. The second study explored infant categorization and revealed that when both 6- and 10-month-old infants were familiarized with a category of objects, they responded to novel objects in terms of their categorical membership. These results converge with previous findings obtained by using more traditional methods, and demonstrate the utility of an object-examining task for the exploration of cognitive abilities in the first year of life. Finally, a comparison of two different measures of attention used in this task, examining and looking, revealed that examining time was a better measure of active processing of information about objects than was looking time.