Six-month-old infants' categorization of containment spatial relations

Abstract

Six-month-old infants' ability to form an abstract category of containment was examined using a standard infant categorization task. Infants were habituated to 4 pairs of objects in a containment relation. Following habituation, infants were tested with a novel example of the familiar containment relation and an example of an unfamiliar relation. Results indicate that infants look reliably longer at the unfamiliar versus familiar relation, indicating that they can form a categorical representation of containment. A second experiment demonstrated that infants do not rely on object occlusion to discriminate containment from a support or a behind spatial relation. Together, the results indicate that by 6 months, infants can recognize a containment relation from different angles and across different pairs of objects.

Figure 1

The looking times with standard error of the 6-month-old infants at each test trial in Experiment 1.

Figure 2

The looking times with standard error of the 6-month-old infants in Experiment 2 at the familiar containment spatial relation versus a novel spatial relation, when the first object was as occluded as it had been during habituation (familiar occlusion amount) and when the first object remained visible (novel occlusion amount).