Limits on composition of conceptual operations in 9-month-olds

Complex systems are often built from a relatively small set of basic features or operations that can be combined in myriad ways. We investigated the developmental origins of this compositional architecture in 9-month-old infants, extending recent work that demonstrated rudimentary compositional abilities in preschoolers. Infants viewed two separate object-occlusion events that depicted a single featurechange operation. They were then tested with a combined operation to determine whether they expected the outcome of the two feature changes, even though this combination was unfamiliar. In contrast to preschoolers, infants did not appear to predictively compose these simple feature-change operations. A second experiment demonstrated the ability of infants to track two operations when not combined. The failure to compose basic operations is consistent with limitations on object tracking and early numerical cognition (Feigenson & Yamaguchi, 2009). We suggest that these results can be unified via a general principle: infants have difficulty with multiple updates to a representation of an unobservable.