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Updated: Feb 22, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
Infants make more attempts to achieve a goal when they see adults persist
Julia A Leonard1, Yuna Lee2, Laura E Schulz2
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. jlnrd@mit.edu.
Abstract:
Persistence, above and beyond IQ, is associated with long-term academic outcomes. To look at the effect of adult models on infants' persistence, we conducted an experiment in which 15-month-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: an Effort condition in which they saw an adult try repeatedly, using various methods, to achieve each of two different goals; a No Effort condition in which the adult achieved the goals effortlessly; or a Baseline condition. Infants were then given a difficult, novel task. Across an initial study and two preregistered experiments (N = 262), infants in the Effort condition made more attempts to achieve the goal than did infants in the other conditions. Pedagogical cues modulated the effect. The results suggest that adult models causally affect infants' persistence and that infants can generalize the value of persistence to novel tasks.
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