Infant search errors: stage of concept development or stage of memory development.

An 8-to-I2-month-old infant, having found an object hidden at a first location (A), will frequently continue to search at the A location when the object is moved, in full view of the infant, to a second location (B)and hidden there. In Piaget's (1954) theory of the way in which children acquire knowledge of the external world through actions, the occurrence of such AS(or Stage IV) search errors is considered to provide critical evidence that such infants are egocentrically concerned with their own actions and do not yet appreciate the systematic nature of spatial relationships or the permanence of objects. The present research, however, casts serious doubt upon the considerable theoretical significance that has been attached to the AB error by demonstrating that it occurs primarily as an artifact of the almost universally employe.!! two-choice hiding task, which constrains all search errors made during B-hiding trials to be AB errors. In two experiments using less constrained hiding tasks, infants demonstrated no tendency to search incorrectly at the A location during B-hiding trials, and they produced a pattern of errors supportive of the notion that search errors result from a memory problem rather than from a conceptual one. A memory explanation is proposed to account for the present results as well as for search errors made throughout the sensorimotor period of development.