%0 Journal Article
%T Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Generalize to Analog Props across a Two-Week Retention Interval in an Elicited Imitation Paradigm
%A Osman S. Kingo
%A Peter Kr£żjgaard
%J Child Development Research
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/786862
%X We report a generalization experiment in which 72 18-month-old infants were tested in the elicited imitation paradigm. Two questions were addressed: (1) whether infants' were able to generalize to differently looking (shape and color changes) but functionally equivalent props and (2) whether narrative support at both encoding and retrieval would facilitate memory. The results revealed that the 18-month-old infants were indeed capable of generalizing to differently looking but functionally equivalent props across a retention interval of two weeks. However, contrary to expectations, narrative support did not facilitate memory or generalization. 1. Introduction Compared to other species, human beings seem to excel in the ability to transfer knowledge from one domain to another [1]. This ability is a basic requirement behind the idea of having formalized educational systems like schools where children are supposed to acquire knowledge in many different versatile domains like reading, writing, and math in order to be able to apply such knowledge to different domains outside the school. Knowledge transfer is also a crucial component in creativity and analogical problem solving (e.g., [2]). This raises the question regarding when and how infants and children begin to be able to generalize knowledge from one domain to another. However, in order to transfer knowledge from one domain to another one will have to remember what has been learned. Infant memory has been investigated by means of at least three different paradigms: (1) visual habituation, (2) conjugate reinforcement, and (3) deferred and elicited imitation [3¨C6]. Studies from the latter two paradigms especially have addressed to what extent infants are capable of transferring knowledge across domains. Results from these two paradigms are treated separately in the following. In an extensive series of studies using the conjugate reinforcement paradigm, Rovee-Collier and her collaborators have, for instance, systematically investigated how changes between the encoding setting and the retrieval setting influence infantsĦŻ memory abilities across age (for a recent review, see [6]). The basic conjugate reinforcement design involves 2¨C6-month-old infants placed under a mobile with a ribbon attached to his or her leg. After having established a baseline measure of the number of kicks per minute with the ribbon loosely attached to the fence of the bed, the ribbon is attached to the mobile in such a manner that whenever the infant kicks the mobile moves for a nine minutes learning sequence. This is followed by an
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cdr/2013/786862/