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Six-month-old Infants' Categorization of Containment Spatial Relations

Overview
Journal Child Dev
Specialty Pediatrics
Date 2003 Jun 11
PMID 12795384
Citations 40
Authors
Marianella Casasola
Leslie B Cohen
Elizabeth Chiarello
Affiliations
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Abstract

Six-month-old infants' ability to form an abstract category of containment was examined using a standard infant categorization task. Infants were habituated to 4 pairs of objects in a containment relation. Following habituation, infants were tested with a novel example of the familiar containment relation and an example of an unfamiliar relation. Results indicate that infants look reliably longer at the unfamiliar versus familiar relation, indicating that they can form a categorical representation of containment. A second experiment demonstrated that infants do not rely on object occlusion to discriminate containment from a support or a behind spatial relation. Together, the results indicate that by 6 months, infants can recognize a containment relation from different angles and across different pairs of objects.

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