Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants. 2021

Hermann Bulf, and Ermanno Quadrelli, and Shannon Brady, and Bryan Nguyen, and Viola Macchi Cassia, and Scott P Johnson
Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants' ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants' transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants' transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual-AV-condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory-VA-condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants' individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007223 Infant A child between 1 and 23 months of age. Infants
D007858 Learning Relatively permanent change in behavior that is the result of past experience or practice. The concept includes the acquisition of knowledge. Phenomenography
D008037 Linguistics The science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Linguistic
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D013060 Speech Communication through a system of conventional vocal symbols. Public Speaking,Speaking, Public
D014163 Transfer, Psychology Change in learning in one situation due to prior learning in another situation. The transfer can be positive (with second learning improved by first) or negative (where the reverse holds). Transfer (Psychology),Transfer of Learning,Transfer of Training,Learning Transfer,Psychology Transfer,Psychology Transfers,Training Transfer,Transfers (Psychology),Transfers, Psychology

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