Development of knowledge of visual-tactual affordances of substance.
Infants of 12 months were familiarized in the dark with an object of either a hard or an elastic (spongy) substance. Following 60 sec of manipulation, a visual preference test was given with simultaneous presentation of 2 films of identical objects, 1 moving in a pattern characteristic of a rigid object and 1 moving in a pattern characteristic of an elastic object. Infants handled the 2 substances differently in an appropriate manner and looked preferentially with more and longer first looks to the type of substance familiarized. A replication of this experiment with familiarization in the light yielded comparable results. A third experiment with 1-month-old infants allowed them to mouth objects of either a hard or a soft substance for haptic familiarization and then tested looking preferences with real objects moving rigidly or deforming. These infants looked longer at the object moving in a manner characteristic of the novel substance. The results, together, suggest that quite young infants detect intermodal invariants specifying some substances and perceive the affordance of the substance.
D002657:Child Development; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D013236:Stereognosis; D014110:Touch