Infants' Perseverative Search Errors Are Induced by Pragmatic Misinterpretation
József Topál,1*
György Gergely,1,2
Ádám Miklósi,3
Ágnes Erd
hegyi,3
Gergely Csibra2,4
Having repeatedly retrieved an object from a location, human
infants tend to search the same place even when they observe
the object being hidden at another location. This perseverative
error is usually explained by infants' inability to inhibit
a previously rewarded search response or to recall the new location.
We show that the tendency to commit this error is substantially
reduced (from 81 to 41%) when the object is hidden in front
of 10-month-old infants without the experimenter using the communicative
cues that normally accompany object hiding in this task. We
suggest that this improvement is due to an interpretive bias
that normally helps infants learn from demonstrations but misleads
them in the context of a hiding game. Our finding provides an
alternative theoretical perspective on the nature of infants'
perseverative search errors.
2 Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Budapest H-1051, Hungary.
3 Department of Ethology, Eötvös University, Budapest H-1117, Hungary.
4 School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1 E7HX, UK.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: topaljozsef{at}gmail.com
