Rethinking infant knowledge: toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks.

By Yuko Munakata, James L. McClelland, M. Johnson, Robert S. Siegler. 1997

Infants seem sensitive to hidden objects in habituation tasks at 3.5 months but fail to retrieve hidden objects until 8 months. The authors first consider principle-based accounts of these successes and failures, in which early successes imply knowledge of principles and failures are attributed to ancillary deficits. One account is that infants younger than 8 months have the object permanence principle but lack means-ends abilities. To test this, 7-month-olds were trained on means-ends behaviors and were tested on retrieval of visible and occluded toys. Means-ends demands were the same, yet infants made more toy-guided retrievals in the visible case. The authors offer an adaptive process account in which knowledge is graded and embedded in specific behavioral processes. Simulation models that learn gradually to represent occluded objects show how this approach can account for success and failure in object permanence tasks without assuming principles and ancillary deficits.

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Citations in the corpus

Relational Neural Expectation Maximization: Unsupervised Discovery of Objects and their Interactions (2018, background): “The fact that young infants already exhibit this ability, may even suggest an innate bias towards compositionality (Lake et al., 2016; Munakata et al., 1997; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007).”
Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach (2004, methodology): “The network illustrated in the figure is similar to networks that have been used in many other studies to investigate how PDP models may extract structure from exposure to event sequences (Elman, 1990; Cleeremans, Servan-Schreiber, & McClelland, 1989; Munakata et al., 1997).”
Knowledge Change as a Function of Mathematics Experience: All Contexts are Not Created Equal (2005, background): “As suggested by prior work (e.g., Munakata et al., 1997; Strohner, 1974), newly emerging ways of thinking about a concept may be particularly sensitive to variations in context.”
Word learning emerges from the interaction of online referent selection and slow associative learning (2012, methodology): “By situating learning in connection weights and situation-time processing in changing activation, our approach is broadly consistent with classic connectionist thinking on development (Elman, 1990; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Munakata, 1998; Munakata & McClelland, 2003; Munakata et al., 1997).”
Motor Development (2006, background): “On the other side of the loop, researchers study the mental representations viewed as integral to motor actions (e.g., Gilmore & Johnson, 1995; S. P. Johnson et al., 2003, 2004; Munakata et al., 1997; Shinskey & Munakata, 2003; Spelke & von Hofsten, 2001; Spencer & Schöner, 2003).”
Bases for Object Individuation in Infancy: Evidence From Manual Search (2000, background): “Furthermore, this task requires that infants’ representations of the objects they saw be robust enough to support a manual search rather than a looking response (see Munakata et al., 1997).”
Middle-School Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign: The Books They Read Can't Help (2006, background): “Indeed, a number of researchers have argued that knowledge of concepts may be context dependent (e.g., Barsalou, 1982; Munakata, McClelland, Johnson, & Siegler, 1997; Thelen & Smith, 1994).”
Doing without schema hierarchies: a recurrent connectionist approach to normal and impaired routine sequential action. (2004, unknown): “... Plaut & Kello, 1999), lexical semantics (Moss, Hare, Day, & Tyler, 1994), reading (Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, & Cleeremans, 2001; Plaut, 1999), sentence processing (Allen & Seidenberg, 1999; Christiansen & Chater, 1999; Rohde, 2002; Rohde & Plaut, 1999), implicit learning (Cleeremans, 1993; Cleer”
Structural Priming as Implicit Learning in Language Acquisition: The Persistence of Lexical and Structural Priming in 4-Year-Olds (2006, background): “For example, Pickering and Branigan (1998) found that the effect of priming the dative construction (e.”