The classic gavagai problem exemplifies the difficulty to identify the referent of a novel word uttered in a foreign language. Here, we consider the reverse problem: identifying the referential part of a label. Assuming "gavagai" indicates a rabbit in a foreign language, it may very well mean ""a" rabbit" or ""that" rabbit". How can a learner know…

Recent research suggests that 9-month-old infants tested in a modified version of the A-not-B search task covertly imitate actions performed by the experimenter. The current study examines whether infants also simulate actions performed by mechanical devices, and whether this varies with whether or not they have been familiarized with the devices…

Do infants develop meaningful social preferences among novel individuals based on their social group membership? If so, do these social preferences depend on familiarity on any dimension, or on a more specific focus on particular kinds of categorical information? The present experiments use methods that have previously demonstrated infants' social…

Six- and 12-month-old infant's eye movements were recorded as they observed feeding actions being performed in a rational or non-rational manner. Twelve-month-olds fixated the goal of these actions before the food arrived (anticipation); the latency of these gaze shifts being dependent (r=0.69) on infants life experience being feed. In addition,…

It is well established that faces, in contrast to objects, are categorized as fast or faster at the individual level (e.g., Bill Clinton) than at the basic-level (e.g., human face). This subordinate-shift from basic-level categorization has been considered an outcome of visual expertise with processing faces. However, in the present study we found…

Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…

Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words…

Recent studies using a violation-of-expectation task suggest that preverbal infants are capable of recognizing basic arithmetical operations involving visual objects. There is still debate, however, over whether their performance is based on any expectation of the arithmetical operations, or on a general perceptual tendency to prefer visually…

The present research examined alternative accounts of prior violation-of-expectation (VOE) reports that young infants can represent and reason about hidden objects. According to these accounts, young infants' apparent success in these VOE tasks reflects only novelty and familiarity preferences induced by the habituation or familiarization trials…

Two experiments examined memory of 7-month-olds after 2-week retention interval for passages of two Mozart movements heard daily for 2 weeks. Results suggested that the infants retained familiarized music in long-term memory and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical…