TY - JOUR
T1 - Predictable locations aid early object name learning
AU - Benitez, Viridiana L.
AU - Smith, Linda B.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Amy Richards, Lauren Baker, David Samuels, Char Wozniak and Kelly Dakarian for assistance in the data collection and coding. We thank Dana Schuller for the design of the stimuli and conducting a pilot study with the pop-up box as part of her master’s thesis. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. The research was supported by National Institutes of Child Health and Development, R21HD068475.
PY - 2012/12
Y1 - 2012/12
N2 - Expectancy-based localized attention has been shown to promote the formation and retrieval of multisensory memories in adults. Three experiments show that these processes also characterize attention and learning in 16- to 18-month old infants and, moreover, that these processes may play a critical role in supporting early object name learning. The three experiments show that infants learn names for objects when those objects have predictable rather than varied locations, that infants who anticipate the location of named objects better learn those object names, and that infants integrate experiences that are separated in time but share a common location. Taken together, these results suggest that localized attention, cued attention, and spatial indexing are an inter-related set of processes in young children that aid in the early building of coherent object representations. The relevance of the experimental results and spatial attention for everyday word learning are discussed.
AB - Expectancy-based localized attention has been shown to promote the formation and retrieval of multisensory memories in adults. Three experiments show that these processes also characterize attention and learning in 16- to 18-month old infants and, moreover, that these processes may play a critical role in supporting early object name learning. The three experiments show that infants learn names for objects when those objects have predictable rather than varied locations, that infants who anticipate the location of named objects better learn those object names, and that infants integrate experiences that are separated in time but share a common location. Taken together, these results suggest that localized attention, cued attention, and spatial indexing are an inter-related set of processes in young children that aid in the early building of coherent object representations. The relevance of the experimental results and spatial attention for everyday word learning are discussed.
KW - Attention
KW - Development
KW - Infancy
KW - Word learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.006
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.006
M3 - Article
C2 - 22989872
AN - SCOPUS:84867396334
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 125
SP - 339
EP - 352
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -