Abstract
The current research examined infants’ ability to generalize information about the nonobvious properties of objects depicted in picture books to their real-world referents. Infants aged 13, 15, and 18months (N=135) were shown a series of pictures depicting an adult acting on a novel object to elicit a nonobvious property of that object. Infants were subsequently tested on their extension of the nonobvious property to the real-world object depicted in the book and their generalization of this property to a different color exemplar of the depicted object. Results indicated that, regardless of age, infants expected the real-world objects to have the nonobvious property, as indicated by their attempts to elicit this property with these objects. These findings indicate that early in their second year of life, infants are beginning to make inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties based on information provided in pictures.
Highlights
Inductive reasoning involves making an inference about the properties of one category member based on knowledge of the properties of another member of the same category
If infants attempted to elicit the property of the depicted target object on the real target objects in the experimental condition but not in the baseline condition, this would provide evidence that infants were transferring information learned from the pictures to their real-world referents
Recall that if infants attempted to elicit the property of the depicted target object on the real target objects in the experimental condition but not in the baseline condition, this would provide evidence that infants had transferred information about the nonobvious property from pictures to real-world referents
Summary
Inductive reasoning involves making an inference about the properties of one category member based on knowledge of the properties of another member of the same category (see Hayes, Heit, & Swendsen, 2010, for a review). J. Keates et al / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 125 (2014) 35–47 by infants’ willingness to generalize a nonobvious property of one object to another object if they view them as belonging to the same category (Baldwin, Markman, & Melartin, 1993; Welder & Graham, 2001). Keates et al / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 125 (2014) 35–47 by infants’ willingness to generalize a nonobvious property of one object to another object if they view them as belonging to the same category (Baldwin, Markman, & Melartin, 1993; Welder & Graham, 2001) In this experiment, we asked whether 13-, 15-, and 18-month-old infants would draw inductive inferences about real objects based on information presented symbolically during a picture book interaction. Infants will rely on information about category membership, in the form of shared count nouns or shared perceptual similarity, to determine whether two objects belong to the same category and share nonobvious properties (Graham & Diesendruck, 2010; Graham & Kilbreath, 2007; Graham et al, 2004; Keates & Graham, 2008; Welder & Graham, 2001)
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