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The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to...
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 9, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
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Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents.

Fransisca Ting1, Zijing He2, Renée Baillargeon1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|April 16, 2021
PubMed
Summary

Five-month-old infants understand that agents use inference and general knowledge to gain information. They expect agents to use physical knowledge to find hidden objects, indicating sophisticated early reasoning.

Keywords:
InfancyInferenceKnowledgePreferenceTheory of mindTwo-system accounts

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Infant Psychology
  • Theory of Mind

Background:

  • Young infants track information agents gain through perception.
  • Previous research has not examined infants' understanding of inferential information acquisition.
  • Infants by 4 months grasp basic physical rules, like object-container fit.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 5-month-olds understand that agents can infer information using general knowledge.
  • To determine if infants expect agents to integrate physical knowledge into their reasoning about others' actions.

Main Methods:

  • Infants observed an agent searching for a hidden wide toy.
  • The agent chose between a wide and a narrow box to search.
  • Looking time was measured to infer infant expectations.

Main Results:

  • Infants looked longer when the agent chose the narrow box.
  • This suggests infants expected the agent to use physical knowledge and infer the toy's location.
  • Results were consistent across additional control conditions.

Conclusions:

  • Young infants track inferential knowledge acquisition in others.
  • Early psychological reasoning in infants is more integrated than previously thought.
  • Findings support one-system accounts of cognitive development, challenging two-system models.