By Bruce Bower
Babies may look like they’re stuck in the here and now, but new research suggests they use what adults do and say as opportunities to generalize about the world.
Oddly enough, the findings link infants’ readiness for social learning to their tendency to make what looks like an obvious error, at least to adults. Babies will keep looking in the same hiding place for a toy after it’s been moved elsewhere.
This puzzling behavior, studied by scientists for more than 50 years, hinges on babies’ natural tendency to generalize about the meaning of social signals they receive from adults, say cognitive ethologist József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and his colleagues.
Topál’s group proposes that social signals from an experimenter repeatedly placing a toy under a cup allow 10-month-olds watching to make a practical inference, akin to “this kind of object is found under that cup.” Upon seeing the toy get hidden under another cup, a few seconds later the infant acts on his or her previous knowledge and reaches for the first cup, the researchers conclude in the Sept. 26 Science. This effect is called the “A-not-B error,” since babies choose the A cup after the toy has been moved to the B cup.