San Anton , E. 1, 2 , Destrebecqz, A. 1 & Bertels, J. 1, 2
1 Université Libre de Bruxelles, Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN)
2 Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
Both humans and animals are able to learn covariations between stimuli. One example is language learning by children. Saffran et al. (1996) demonstrated that infants could learn auditory patterns of covariation at 8 months. Kirkham et al. (2002) showed that these results could be generalized to the visual domain. The aim of the present study is to identify what infants learn in that situation. The experiment was divided into two parts: a habituation and a test phase. During the habituation phase, 8 m.-o. infants were exposed to the random presentation of three pairs of colored shapes. As soon as the habituation criterion was reached, the test phase started. The main difference with Kirkham et al. (2002) is that on each test trial a single pair was presented repeatedly. On familiar trials, the test pairs were identical to the training pairs. On novel trials, the test pairs were composed of the same shapes but in an untrained order. Unlike Kirkham et al. (2002) and Saffran et al. (1996), preliminary results revealed a familiarity preference: participants looked longer at familiar than at novel test trials, indicating that infants learned pairwise regularities. Results will be discussed at the conference.