The role of observational learning in perceiving pbject properties in infants (March 2008)

Infants become skilful at manipulating objects around the end of the first year of life. The question asked here is how do they learn about object properties and what is the role of observation in learning to manipulate objects. In order to answer these questions we designed an experiment where we compared the effect of practice versus observation on learning new motor skills. We tested 84 infants aged 8, 10, 12, 15 and 18 months on two different tasks: a simple grasping task and a more complex retrieval task. We compared two groups of infants: an observation group where the experimenter presented directly the infants with the demonstration of the targeted action and then gave the infant the object to manipulate; and a self-exploratory group where infants were presented with a spontaneous trial before the demonstration. The results show that for a simple grasping task, only the youngest infants benefit both from practice and observation because of their poor performance at the very first, spontaneous, trial. As for the retrieval task, infants learned only by observation and not before 15 month of age.