Spatial reference systems and the canonicality effect in infant search

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Abstract

Infants have a bias in search tasks toward reaching centrally in their visual field rather than peripherally. When care is taken to control this, another bias has been found: one toward treating upright cups as more reliable location markers for a hidden object than inverted cups. This has been named the “canonicality effect”. In this study, the two biases are elicited in the same sample of infants. When a transposition design resulted in the hidden object maintaining either a central or a constant peripheral position, infants searched more reliably centrally than peripherally, regardless of the orientation of the cups hiding the object. However, this bias toward centrality did not hold when the position of the hidden object was not held constant in relation to its initial position: when transposition resulted in the object shifting from a central to a peripheral position, or vice versa, the infants shifted search more reliably with upright cups than with inverted ones regardless of the central-peripheral variable. The two biases seem to be alternatives. Infants apparently switch between spatial codes, rather than employing both codes across all conditions. It was found possible to reverse the canonicality effect under predicted conditions in a way which confirms its analysis as a local spatial encoding of the point of search, that is as a relation between object and hiding place.

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The research forms part of the Bristol LARINCS project supported by the SSRC.

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