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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 9, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Biases towards internal features in infants' reasoning about objects.

George E Newman¹, Patricia Herrmann, Karen Wynn

¹Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520 USA. george.newman@yale.edu

|December 11, 2007

Summary

Fourteen-month-old infants associate object behavior with internal features, but only when the behavior is self-generated. This developmental finding impacts our understanding of early cognitive development and object perception.

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Published on: October 5, 2018

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science
Infant Perception

Background:

Understanding how infants attribute properties to objects is crucial for cognitive development research.
Previous research has explored infant object recognition, but the role of self-generated behavior is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether 14-month-old infants associate an object's behavior with its internal or external features.
To determine if self-generated behavior influences infants' feature-behavior associations.

Main Methods:

Experiment 1: Infants were familiarized with animated cats exhibiting distinct self-generated motions.
Infants then viewed a novel individual, linking internal (stomach color) and external (hat color) features to familiar cats.
Experiment 2: Utilized an object choice paradigm to confirm findings on feature prioritization based on behavior.

Main Results:

Infants showed a preference for associating motion with external features (hat color) over internal features (stomach color) in Experiment 1.
Experiment 2 revealed that infants prioritized internal features only when the object's behavior was self-generated.
In the absence of self-generated behavior, infants did not prioritize internal features.

Conclusions:

Fourteen-month-old infants' attribution of behavior to object features is modulated by whether the behavior is self-generated.
This suggests a developmental shift in how infants integrate behavior and feature information for object understanding.
Findings contribute to theories of early causal reasoning and object perception in infants.