The Nature and Processes of Preverbal Learning: Implications from Nine-Month-Old Infants' Discrimination Problem Solving (Monographs of the Society)

In a sequence of carefully designed studies, the authors document infants' abilities to extract the relevant (i.e. rewarded) attribute from complex arrays of color, shape, and texture. The evidence indictes that the infant's discrimination is based on abstracting the dimensions of the array, rather than learning to respond to a particular example. Moreover, the process of learning takes the form of hypothesis-testing and hence implies some type of internal mediation. Addressing an issue that has long been controversial (and whose history the authors summarize in a masterful fashion), this work has significant implications for understanding the nature of early learning.