Infant perception of correlations among attributes

Infants' sensitivity to correlations or co-occurrences among attributes may play a role in abilities ranging from pattern or object recognition to category formation. The present set of experiments investigated 4-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants' ability to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context (i.e., with the correlation embedded in a set of discriminable stimuli). In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, 10-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes. In contrast, 4- and 7-month-old infants responded primarily on the basis of specific featural information, but did not respond reliably to the correlation. It is suggested that the sensitivity to correlated attributes demonstrated by 10-month-old infants may have implications for the processes underlying the infants' categorization abilities.