Spatial expectations of young human infants, following passive movement

Three experiments are described that investigate 4.5-month-old infants' spatial thinking during passive movement using a task that required no manual or visual search. In these experiments, infants habituated to a display located near one corner of a table. Before the test trial the infants were either moved to the opposite side of the table or they remained in the same position that they held during the habituation trials. Also, between the habituation trials and the test trial, the display was either surreptitiously moved to the diagonally opposite position on the table, or the display remained stationary. The results showed that infants generally dishabituated when the actual (allocentric/objective) location of the display was changed between habituation and test. However, in Experiment 3, in which infants had reduced experience moving around the testing chamber, infants dishabituated to a change in their egocentric spatial relationship to the display. The results of this experiment suggest that experience moving around the testing chamber was a prerequisite for such location constancy. Taken together, the findings presented here indicate that with enough experience, young infants become aware of key spatial relationships in their environment during passive movement.