The roles of item repetition and position in infants’ abstract rule learning

• Main Authors: Johnson, S.P (Author), Marcus, G.F (Author), Schonberg, C. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2018
• Subjects: Abstract rule learning; adult; Adult; Analogical reasoning; article; attention; Attention; child development; Child Development; clinical article; female; Female; habituation; Habituation, Psychophysiologic; human; Humans; infant; Infant; Infant learning; learning; Learning; male; Male; memory; Memory; Perceptual primitives; physiology; sequence learning; Sequence learning
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 We asked whether 11- and 14- month-old infants’ abstract rule learning, an early form of analogical reasoning, is susceptible to processing constraints imposed by limits in attention and memory for sequence position. We examined 11- and 14- month-old infants’ learning and generalization of abstract repetition rules (“repetition anywhere,” Experiment 1 or “medial repetition,” Experiment 2) and ordering of specific items (edge positions, Experiment 3) in 4-item sequences. Infants were habituated to sequences containing repetition- and/or position-based structure and then tested with “familiar” vs. “novel” (random) sequences composed of new items. Eleven-month-olds (N = 40) failed to learn abstract repetition rules, but 14-month-olds (N = 40) learned rules under both conditions. In Experiment 3, 11-month-olds (N = 20) learned item edge positions in sequences identical to those in Experiment 2. We conclude that infant sequence learning is constrained by item position in similar ways as in adults. © 2018 Elsevier Inc.