Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy. Issue 4 (26th February 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bertels, Julie; San Anton, Estibaliz; Gebuis, Titia; Destrebecqz, Arnaud
• Is Part Of: Developmental science. Volume 20:Issue 4(2017)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2016-02-26
• Subjects: Developmental psychology -- Periodicals; Psychology, Comparative -- Periodicals; 155
• DOI: 10.1111/desc.12397
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1363-755X

Abstract

Abstract: Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002 ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002 ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented. With this aim, we used a visual associative learning procedure inspired by the contextual cuing paradigm, with infants from 8 to 12 months of age. In two experiments, in which we varied the complexity of the stimuli, we first habituated infants to several scenes where the location of a target (a cartoon character) was consistently associated with a context, namely a specific configuration of geometrical shapes. Second, we examined whether infants learned the covariation between the target location and the context by measuring looking times at scenes that either respected or violated the association. In both experiments, results showed that infants learned the target–context associations, as they looked longer at the familiar scenes than at the novel ones. In particular, infants selected clusters of co‐occurring contextual shapes and learned the covariation between the target location and this subset. These results support the existence of a powerful and versatile statistical learning mechanism that may influence the orientation of infants' visual attention toward areas of interest in their environment during early developmental stages. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hm1unyLBn0 Abstract : We explored the statistical learning of visual contingencies in 8‐ to 12‐month‐old infants. We investigated whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented. To address this issue, we used a visual associative learning procedure that is reminiscent of the contextual cuing paradigm. We observed that infants could learn the target‐context associations. In particular, infants selected clusters of co‐occurring contextual shapes and learned the covariation between the target location and this subset, as revealed by strong correlations between the target‐cluster distance during training and the familiarity effect at test.