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Infants Learn What They Want to Learn: Responding to Infant Pointing Leads to Superior Learning
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Begus, Katarina Gliga, Teodora Southgate, Victoria |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether giving the child the leading role in deciding what information to receive leads to better learning. Sixteen-month-olds were introduced to pairs of novel objects and, once they had pointed to an object, were shown a function for either the object they had chosen, or the object they had ignored. Ten minutes later, infants replicated the functions of chosen objects significantly more than those of un-chosen objects, despite having been equally visually attentive during demonstrations on both types of objects. These results show that offering information in response to infants' communicative gestures leads to superior learning (Experiment 1) and that this difference in performance is due to learning being facilitated when infants' pointing was responded to, not hindered when their pointing was ignored (Experiment 2), highlighting the importance of infants' own active engagement in acquiring information. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1371/journal.pone.0108817 |
| PubMed reference number | 25290444 |
| Journal | Medline |
| Volume Number | 9 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/cbcd/files/people/scientificstaff/teodora/copy_of_journal.pone.0108817.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/teodora/copy_of_journal.pone.0108817.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/10671/1/10671.pdf |
| Journal | PloS one |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |