Flexible Attentional Learning in Infancy

One important component underlying lexical extension, categorization and induction tasks is the ability to flexibly attend to different dimensions in a variety of contexts. Flexible behaviors are well documented in young children, and it is often argued that (a) associations and associative mechanisms are too unconstrained to allow for such flexibility and (b) flexibility requires conceptual knowledge to determine what dimension is important in a given context. The current experiments examined whether infants could exhibit flexibility when presented with arbitrarily paired dimensions and contexts. Experiment 1 demonstrates that 12month-old infants can readily learn arbitrary dimensioncontext contingencies after a few minutes of training (e.g., shape is important in Context 1 and color is important in Context 2). This finding demonstrates that the ability to flexibly attend to different stimulus dimensions can be achieved by associative means. Experiment 2 examined factors that affect flexible attention: Adding a redundant cross-modal cue attenuated rather than facilitated learning.