RELEVANCY BETWEEN DIRECT PERCEPTION AND PRIOR EXPERIENCE IN THE OBJECT SEARCH TASK BY INFANTS

Abstract

To examine the relevancy between direct perception and prior experience in the development of object cognition, three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, six tasks which were combined with two delay time conditions (0 and 3 sec.) and three conditions of different spatial cues were administered to eight 8-month old babies, and the differences of the occurrence rate of AB error were compared. In Experiment 2, eight 8-month old babies were tested to see whether they had committed AB error in the case of their having passive search experience alone. In Experiment 3, twenty-two 13 to 21-month old babies were tested to investigate whether they had committed AB error and the residual responses similar to stage IV in the stage V task of doubled invisible displacement and the influence of spatial cue on those responses were examined. The main results showed that both direct perception and prior experience contributed to babies' cognition of objects and they were related to each other not only coordinatedly but also conflictingly, according to delayed time and the characteristics of spatial cue introduced.