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Updated: May 14, 2026
Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
Perceptual-motor constraints on decision making: the case of the manual search behavior for hidden objects in
1Laboratoire Psychologie et Neurosciences de la Cognition et de l'Affectivité, Université de Rouen, 76821 Mont-Saint-Aignan, France. james.riviere@univ-rouen.fr
Insights
Toddlers
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Developmental Psychology
- Perceptual-Motor Integration
Background:
- The C-not-B task assesses object permanence and inhibitory control in young children.
- Previous research indicates 2.5-year-olds often fail this task, searching where an agent's hand moved, not where the object was hidden.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the perceptual-motor constraints influencing toddlers' performance in the C-not-B task.
- To determine if visuomotor activation can be inhibited by altering reaching pathways.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments using a modified C-not-B task with 2.5-year-old children.
- Experiment 1: Introduced a transparent barrier to obstruct direct reaching.
- Experiment 2: Controlled for movement duration.
- Experiment 3: Compared pointing versus reaching responses.
Main Results:
- Toddlers performed better in the C-not-B task with a transparent barrier.
- Performance improvement was not solely due to longer movement times.
- Pointing responses facilitated greater success than reaching responses.
Conclusions:
- Toddlers' performance in the C-not-B task is influenced by perceptual-motor system constraints.
- Decision-making and judgments in toddlers are modulated by the physical constraints of action execution.
Abstract:
In the C-not-B task, 2.5-year-old children tend to look for an object in a location to which the hiding agent moved his hand (C) after moving an object from A to B. In three experiments, the authors investigated the nature of the constraints underlying toddlers' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds were tested in a new version of the C-not-B task to investigate whether reaching with a detour leads to inhibition of direct visuomotor activation. The findings show that toddlers succeed more in the C-not-B task when a transparent barrier obstructs the path of the reaching movement. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that the successful performance of the children with a barrier cannot merely be the consequence of the longer duration of arm movements. In Experiment 3, pointing responses generated more toddlers' success in the C-not-B task than did reaching responses. These experiments suggest that decision-making processes and judgments in toddlers are affected by constraints intrinsic to the perceptual-motor system.
