Learning About Objects in Infancy

Amy Work Needham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138643598
• eBook ISBN: 9781317242062
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How do young infants experience the world around them? How similar or different are infants' experiences from adults' experiences of similar situations? How do infants progress from relatively sparse knowledge and expectations early in life to much more elaborate knowledge and expectations just several months later? We know that much of infants' learning before four to five months of age is visually-based. As they develop the ability to reach for objects independently, they can explore objects that are of particular interest to them—a new skill that must be important for their learning. Through this transition to independent reaching and exploration, infants go a long way toward forming their own understandings of the objects around them. Towards the end of the first year of life, infants begin manipulating one object relative to another and this skill sets the stage for them to begin using objects instrumentally—using one object to create changes in other objects. This new ability opens up many opportunities for infants to learn about using tools.

In this volume, Amy Work Needham provides an extensive overview of her research on infant learning, with a particular focus on how infants learn about objects. She begins with an explanation of how basic aspects of how infants' visual exploration of objects allows them to create new knowledge about objects and object categories. She continues with a description of infants' visual and manual learning about hand-held tools and how these tools can be used to achieve goals. Throughout, she focuses on active learning and development, which results in infants making important contributions to their own learning about objects. She concludes by synthesizing the findings discussed, pulls out recurring themes across studies, and brings together fundamental principles of how infants learn about objects.

1
Introduction

How do infants perceive, learn about, and understand the world around them? These questions have motivated large amounts of groundbreaking research, and they were the questions that led me to begin studying infants about 25 years ago. It is a fascinating puzzle that may seem impossible to solve because infants’ response capabilities are so limited (answering questions verbally or pushing buttons quickly are out of the question!). However, thanks to studies making use of the actions infants can engage in (most of these also using clever experimental designs and methodologies), researchers have made progress on filling in some pieces of that puzzle to provide a sense of how infants of different ages experience their surroundings (e.g., Aslin, 2012; Aslin & Fiser, 2002; Baillargeon, Li, Ng, & Yuan, 2009; Hespos & Rochat, 1997; Johnson & Aslin, 1995; Kellman & Spelke, 1983; Needham & Baillargeon, 1993; Oakes & Cohen, 1990; Reynolds & Guy, 2012; Slater, Mattock, & Brown, 1990; Wilcox, 1999; Wilcox, Bortfeld, Woods, Wruck, & Boas, 2008). Even more intriguing for students of development, researchers in the field have started making some progress on understanding infant learning—the processes and experiences that move infants from one ability level to another. Although there is much left to understand about how infant abilities change over time, we are starting to piece together some answers to these questions. Of course, we assume that infants’ and young children’s abilities are getting better and better throughout development, but the specifics of how one ability or experience sets the stage for or leads to another can produce important conclusions about underlying developmental mechanisms.

In this book, I discuss research conducted in my laboratory and other labs all over the world investigating what infants learn about objects and how they accomplish this learning. Because of my focus on learning, I will pay special attention to studies that allow us to make inferences not just about what infants know but also how they may have acquired that knowledge. There are many ways in which infants learn about objects, most all of which involve some kind of exploration (Gibson, 1988). Object exploration comes in many forms, including purely visual, tactile (whether oral or manual), visual-tactile, and exploration in which one object is used to act upon another object. Infants engage in these different forms of exploration quite frequently, although, as we’ll see later on, there are developmental trajectories for different forms of object exploration.

Each of these forms of object exploration requires a certain set of motor abilities. As infants’ motor abilities improve, new opportunities for learning about objects arise (Bushnell & Boudreau, 1993; Gibson, 1988). For instance, when infants begin independent reaching for objects, they gain access to a whole new set of things to learn about—objects that are within their reach and potentially graspable. No object within that circle of “near space” is safe from the infant’s inquisitive eyes, fingers, and mouth. Similarly, when infants begin self-locomotion, even objects across the room can be targets for exploration and learning, and when infants begin walking, objects far away and (relatively) high off the floor are potentially available for infants’ exploratory actions.

The linkages between the development of new actions and the opportunities for learning about objects that come about as a result of each new motor ability are critically important. These phenomena are of particular interest because understanding how new motor abilities facilitate learning provides a window into the origins of infants’ knowledge.

A Developmental Analysis of Learning Opportunities

Infants come into the world with a repertoire of behavior that is severely limited. They gain control over their eye movements relatively quickly, but most other body movements (which are required to interact with objects) require lengthy intervals of learning and development. In these first months of life, infants rarely interact directly with objects. Even when objects are placed in their hands, infants less than 3 months of age do not spend much time exploring them (Rochat, 1989). Although Piaget thought that this direct interaction with objects over many, many months was critically important to infants’ learning about the physical world (1952, 1954), it is now widely accepted that this hands-on behavior is useful in many ways but not required for learning about the physical world.

Infants do not need to wait for their manual skills (e.g., independent reaching) to mature for learning about objects to proceed. For instance, watching as ice cubes drop into a glass or as coins fall from an open hand, infants may come to expect that objects fall down when they are released in midair. We know that by 4 months of age, infants expect objects to fall down and not to remain in midair when released (Needham & Baillargeon, 1993). It seems as though the key information necessary to learn about the effects of gravity on objects is readily visible from a distance. In contrast, learning about the texture or temperature of objects may be nearly impossible to do from afar and learned primarily via feedback received during one’s own exploratory actions (Bushnell & Boudreau, 1993; Lederman & Klatzky, 1987).

There are of course many statistical regularities present in the environment that infants could learn about (not just that objects fall down when their supports are removed). One of these is the focus of Chapter 2: the ways in which object appearance, including shape, color, and pattern, can be used to anticipate the likely locations of object boundaries. In that chapter, I describe research indicating that infants definitely do make use of object shape (at a young age) and other object characteristics (in subsequent months) to determine object boundary locations.

As infants encounter more and more objects of particular kinds, it would be useful for them to form representations of these objects that they store in memory and use to help them parse new objects. In Chapter 3, I discuss studies that have investigated questions of how infants compare objects across groupings of exemplars and how they store representations of these objects or categories over days of multiple encounters. I’ll also discuss research suggesting that infants have collections of features stored in memory that allow them to identify new objects as exemplars of a particular kind of object that has certain characteristics.

As infants start to make sense of the world, they may be especially aware of the space immediately around their bodies. In order for independent reaching to eventually develop, they must be able to control their arm movements without help from others. Integrating visual and tactile information is an important component of the transition into reaching and of object exploration. In Chapter 4, I will describe research that has investigated infants’ increasing control over their arms, which also facilitates a refinement in their understanding of space near their bodies.

Perhaps the most consequential developmental change that occurs in the first 6 months of life is the transition into independent reaching that is object directed—reaching independently for objects. This transition affects nearly everything about the infant’s life, including the extent to which the infant is able to explore nearby objects. Reaching infants are able to take more control over their manual and visual exploration of objects, determining which objects to reach for, grasp, and bring closer for further exploration as well as what kinds of exploration (visual, manual, oral) are deployed at any point in time. Infants also begin to get a sense of their own personal agency or self-efficacy. Thus, in addition to the increase in the amount of object exploration infants engage in, they can also learn more easily about the effectiveness of their own actions, which could have consequences for their nascent sense of self-efficacy, goals, and intentionality. In Chapter 5, I describe research investigating the cognitive and behavioral consequences of the transition into independent reaching.

The beginnings of reaching are not the only important developmental changes in infants’ reaching skills. There is research investigating changes that happen as infants become skilled reachers, altering their approaches to objects in ways that anticipate the objects’ characteristics and making successful grasping more likely. In Chapter 6, I discuss work from our laboratory and others that documents these improvements in reaching that may be due to improvements in visual-motor communication within the nervous system as well as improvements in planning.

One important change in infants’ object manipulation happens once infants are quite skilled in reaching for objects independently. This change is from sequential to simultaneous manipulation of objects. During sequential manipulation, infants attend to and explore one object at a time; during simultaneous manipulation, infants attend to one object in relation to another. This development of infants’ relational object manipulation sets the stage for infants’ tool use: the quintessential human ability to use one object to cause a change in another object. The development of infants’ learning about and use of tools is a further crucial topic of study, because so many of the actions we humans engage in on a daily basis are mediated by tools. In Chapter 7, I discuss research investigating the factors contributing to infants’ effective tool use. Finally, in Chapter 8, I synthesize the findings discussed across the entire book, pulling out recurring themes across studies and bringing together fundamental principles of how infants learn about objects.

Overall, this book is an extensive discussion of research about infant learning, with a particular focus on how infants learn about objects. Because most of this research has been conducted with infants who are less than 2 years of age, this birth-to-24-months age range will be the focus of almost all of the research I discuss.

2
Learning about how Object Attributes Predict the Locations of Object Boundaries

Imagine the world as seen through the eyes of a young infant. Their experience differs from that of an adult in numerous ways (e.g., the images young infants see are much less clearly focused), but perhaps the most consequential is that infants lack basic knowledge about what they see. This lack of knowledge has multiple consequences. Adults look around them and see collections of things they readily identify: a kitchen table with plates, glasses, and newspapers scattered haphazardly across the surface; a sidewalk with colored chalk, bottles of bubble liquid, and a jump rope left in the middle of play. These objects are meaningful to older children and adults, and we could identify each of these objects just by looking, we could explain in detail how each of these objects are used, and we could make guesses about who left these objects in these states of disarray. But the infant has none of this knowledge. Yet. She might be able to determine where one object ends and another begins, but possibly nothing else about these collections of objects. This chapter focuses on this most basic aspect of object perception: how infants determine the boundaries between objects.

Learning Through Observation

Learning About People and Objects

Certainly, one major focus of the infant’s attention early in life is the people in his or her life. People provide comfort and care; their faces move and their voices are exciting and interesting. But physical objects are important as well: Toys, tools, and other handheld objects provide important targets for learning. According to recent naturalistic studies investigating what infants look at when they look around them (e.g., Aslin, 2009), infants spend roughly equal amounts of time looking at objects and at people. So it is safe to say that objects occupy a considerable amount of infants’ visual attention and as such are likely to be the focus of large amounts of early learning. What infants learn about objects is a critical component of their early knowledge acquisition.

Statistical Learning

We know that infants are expert visual and auditory learners, attending to and learning about many regularities in the world around them (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Gomez & Gerken, 1999). These learning skills are presumably extremely useful to infants as they build a visual database of objects they encounter. They can then query this database to help them make sense of the things they see. After compiling information on many objects, infants may abstract out some characteristics that most objects usually have. For instance, objects tend to be relatively uniform in color, pattern, and texture, whereas the spaces between objects lack those uniformities. Learning could take place at this very general level (regarding all objects) and also at a more specific level, regarding particular categories of objects that share certain characteristics.

For instance, infants may often observe an event in which Mom walks into the kitchen, picks up a round, red object, and takes a bite out of it. An active learner could very quickly determine that those round, red objects in the kitchen are for eating. Perhaps additional apple sightings in other locations would also be identified as food, and trips to the grocery store would allow further enrichment of the object category—these round objects also come in different colors (green, orange, yellow) and in slightly different shapes. Indeed, recent evidence shows that by 6 months of age, infants readily identify plants as sources of food (Wertz & Wynn, 2014).

Seeing objects in their usual locations being used for their typical purposes is also a rich source of information about objects. By 14 months of age, and possibly earlier, infants’ knowledge about some common objects includes the locations where they are typically encountered (Mandler, Fivush, & Reznick, 1987). Context can have a very strong effect on an observer’s perception of an object. In adults, the context in which an object is encountered can have a strong influence over whether the object is identified correctly (Palmer, 1975).

Organizing Objects Based on Their Visual Characteristics

We know that even young babies spend quite a bit of time looking at objects, but do we know whether they analyze and learn about objects as they look at them? One question that has been of particular interest to my colleagues and me is whether infants use objects’ visible characteristics to organize their surfaces into units that correspond to real, three-dimensional objects. According to one theoretical approach based in the information-processing view (Cohen, Chaput, & Cashon, 2002), infants must initially build their percepts starting from individual parts and later organize those parts into wholes. In contrast, other researchers have hypothesized that objects could be perceived in a more holistic way, based on principles similar to Gestalt principles. According to this view, principles like similarity, proximity, good continuation, and good form are utilized to create an organized percept of two-dimensional displays as well as the three-dimensional world for the observer (Wertheimer, 1939/1923).

The literature provides clear evidence that infants use at least some gestalt-like principles in perceptual organization by 3 months of age (e.g., van Giffen & Haith, 1984) and that their sensitivity to these principles is facilitated by learning (Bhatt & Quinn, 2011). Evidence from studies of younger infants supports the idea that newborn infants’ tendency is to see object parts that are spatially separate (either in depth or laterally) as separate objects and come to see these as part of a single object over months of visual experience (e.g., Johnson & Aslin, 1995; Slater, Morison, et al., 1990).

Determining the correct boundaries around objects with some precision is important for infants to begin successful independent reaching for objects. Thus, whether infants build up objects from individual parts or perceive them more holistically, we know that by 4 to 5 months of age, they perceive them well enough to determine good grasping locations in an anticipatory fashion (e.g., prior to initial contact).

The question of how infants determine the locations of boundaries between objects is what motivated our research on this topic.

Early Research on Object Perception in Infancy

In advance of our research, there were prior studies on this question, primarily conducted by Elizabeth Spelke, Philip Kellman, and their colleagues (Kellman, Gleitman, & Spelke, 1987; Kellman & Spelke, 1983; Kellman, Spelke, & Short, 1986). In these studies, infants were shown partly occluded or adjacent objects and tested on whether they (visually) grouped the object portions into a single unit or into separate units. In the landmark study on object perception in infancy, Kellman and Spelke (198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Learning About How Object Attributes Predict the Locations of Object Boundaries
• 3 Representing Objects and Forming Object Categories
• 4 Early Visual-Motor Connections
• 5 Learning to Reach for Objects
• 6 Developing Effective Reaching for Objects
• 7 Learning to Use Tools
• 8 Conclusions and Emergent Themes
• References
• Index