Cognitive development during infancy  281
remembered the learned association for about two
weeks at the age of 6 months, and up to 13 weeks at the
age of 18 months (Rovee-​Collier, 1997).
Infantile amnesia
Interestingly, and despite these significant memory
developments in infancy, children seem to be unable
to recall any memory from the time between birth and
the age of around 2.5 to 3 years, a phenomenon called
infantile amnesia. Although the phenomenon has been
known for a long time, it has only recently become
better understood. Currently, three main possible
explanations exist for infantile amnesia. First, according
to the memory format hypothesis, the format or mode
of the memory changes between early childhood and
later life. One reason for this change is the development
of an additional and abstract representational system,
that is, language. Before a language system is available,
information is stored based on processes of visual
imagery or sensorimotor experience. Once a child
knows that the green and delicious fruit is called “apple,”
it has an additional abstract (linguistic) representational
system available that stores that information
independent of the availability of a concrete stimulus.
Second, the neural change hypothesis states that
some of the main brain structures involved in long-​
term memory, for example the hippocampus and the
frontal cortex, are relatively immature at birth, and
need to develop substantially over the first years of life
to become fully functional (frontal lobes continue to
develop even beyond adolescence). The immaturity
of the structures that are involved in storing and
integrating perceived information results in no or only
fragmentary storage of information, the substantial
change of the involved structures makes the retrieval
more and more difficult or even impossible.
Third, the cueing hypothesis states that a particular cue
is necessary for retrieving a specific memory. An object
the infant has seen an adult play with a few days ago
cues the memory of that observed action. As a result, the
infant imitates the action even though she did not see
the adult demonstrate it again. Similar to the memory
format hypothesis, the format of the cues available to
the infant changes with age once language starts to play
a more important role. In this case, it is not the format
of the memory itself that changes, but rather it is the
format of the cue to elicit a memory that differs between
infancy and older age.
To conclude, there is general consensus that it is difficult
for adults to remember events from early childhood.
However, it is currently not clear whether infantile amnesia
is considered to be a problem of either storage or retrieval
or both, or whether early memories are mainly washed out
or have been updated in a way that makes them difficult to
retrieve.
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In summary, infant memory development research
indicates that around the middle of the first year, infants
discriminate novel stimuli up to several weeks apart.
About three months later, they imitate previously seen
action sequences after an interval of about one month, and
by their first birthday, infants reproduce complex action
sequences even after a delay of several weeks.
So far, we have discussed that at birth, several perceptual
as well as basic cognitive processes, such as attention,
cognitive control, and memory, are already functional, at
least in rudimentary form. Thus, from early on, the infant is
equipped with a powerful set of abilities that are necessary
to perceive and make sense of their social and physical
environment. But how are these abilities best assessed in
infants? We now turn to how this question has been tackled
methodologically.
Assessment of infant perception
and cognition
One of the major advancements in the assessment of
infant cognitive development was the discovery that
infants do not necessarily perceive the world “... as a
great blooming and buzzing confusion” (James, 1890, p.
462). Rather, already at birth, infants seem to have clear
preferences for some things over others. Among the first
who systematically explored infant visual preferences
was Robert Fantz (e.g., 1963). He presented infants with
two patterns of different complexity (e.g., ranging from
uniform gray to a schematic face; see Figure 2), and
measured how long the infant looked at each of them.
The idea behind this procedure was to test whether the
infants differentiate between the two patterns. If infants
looked longer at one of the two patterns, that would
indicate they distinguish between them. Fantz showed
that infants preferentially look toward more complex
patterns.
This finding was the starting point for numerous
studies that made use of infant preferences as
indicators for their perceptual and cognitive
development. Extensions of this research revealed that
infants not only show preferences for visual patterns,
but that they also discriminate between acoustic
stimuli and between different odors. In the case of
sound discrimination, researchers often measure
the rate at which infants suck on a modified pacifier
equipped with a pressure sensor. At an early age,
infants adjust their frequency of sucking quite easily.
For example, they preferentially suck at a frequency
that results in an auditory presentation of their
mother’s voice compared to a stranger’s voice. In case
of odor discrimination, infants have been shown to
orient preferentially toward their mother’s breast pads
compared to breast pads of another lactating woman.
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282  Part IV: Perceptual and cognitive development
40
35
Mean percentage of fixation time
30
25
20
15
10
5 of the fact that an infant has a certain expectation about
0 proceed. When faced with what has been expected,
Face Circles News White
Under 48 hours 2 to 5 days
Figure 2.  Visual preferences of infants in the first months of life.
The mean percentage of time infants under 48 hours old (black
bars), between 2 and 5 days old (dark gray bars), and between
2 and 6 months old (light gray bars) spent looking toward the dif-
ferent stimuli. The respective results suggest an increased interest
in visually more complex stimuli already evident within the first few
hours of life. Adapted from Fantz (1963).
The fact that infants have particular preferences
has been adopted in the study of infant cognitive
development more broadly, including the assessment
of infants’ interpretation of physical and social events
or their categorization of objects, to name only a few
domains. Two widely used paradigms that are based
on preferences are the forced-​choice preferential looking
paradigm and the habituation/​dishabituation paradigm.
Forced-​choice preferential looking (FPL) paradigms
In FPL paradigms, infants are presented simultaneously
with two stimuli or events and their proportional
looking time toward either of them is used to indicate
whether they discriminate between the two stimuli.
This paradigm can be applied to assess sensory and
perceptual preferences as well as cognitively more
demanding preferences, that is, whether infants have a
certain expectation about various events such as physical
laws, causality, or social events. In one example from
the domain of action perception, infants were presented
with an actor who made a grasping action toward
one of two objects, but the action was only presented
uncompleted. In a subsequent test event, two action
outcomes were presented to the infant: One represented
the logical continuation of the previously observed
action, the other a less likely outcome. The results
indicated that infants in the middle of their first year
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of life discriminate between the two action outcomes,
and look longer to the less probable one (see Gredebäck
& Daum, 2015, for an overview). They have at this age
acquired the expectation that once an action has been
started in a certain direction toward a particular goal,
the action is likely to be continued along this direction.
If this expectation is violated, they react with increased
attention. This pattern of reaction is often referred to as
a ‘surprise reaction,’ based on the idea that even adults
show increased interest in a puzzling situation that is in
disagreement with their expectations.
Violation of expectation (VOE) paradigms make use
how the world should look or how an event should
Yellow Red no particular response is observed. In contrast, when
faced with something that is not in line with the infant’s
expectation, this generally results in an increase of
2 to 6 months attention. Typically, this increase is measured via the
infants’ looking time, where a violation of expectation is
evident by longer looking times.
Habituation/​dishabituation (HAB) paradigms
One particular version of the VOE paradigm is the
HAB paradigm. This too makes use of the fact that
infants look longer toward something that violates their
expectation. While using VOE paradigms, the infants’
general or previously established expectation, which
has been established through various kinds of (visual or
active) experiences, is assessed. HAB paradigms include
an additional explicit learning phase (habituation
phase), in which the expectation is established in a
controlled setting. During this phase, HAB paradigms
make use of the universal rule that organisms adjust
to a repeated presentation of stimuli (more simply,
things become increasingly uninteresting the more
often you hear or see them). This is not only found in
infants’ visual processing of observed events, but recent
brain imaging studies have shown that the repeated
presentation of an event results in a phenomenon that
is called repetition suppression (RS). RS consists of a
reduction in blood oxygen level-​dependent (BOLD)
signal in brain areas that are involved in processing
stimuli and has been shown for a wide range of
domains, including the processing of goal-​directed
actions (e.g., anterior intraparietal sulcus with respect
to the processing of observed actions; see Hamilton &
Grafton, 2006).
This effect is exploited in HAB paradigms. Infants
are repeatedly presented with the same (habituation)
event until a habituation criterion is reached (e.g.,
their looking time in the last three habituation trials
is reduced by usually 50 percent compared to the first
three habituation trials). Once this criterion has been
reached, an event (the test) is presented that slightly

differs from the habituation trials. If infants detect the
difference between the habituation and the test event,
that is, they detect that the test event is not congruent
with their previously acquired expectation, their
interest increases compared to the last habituation trials
(i.e., they dishabituate). If infants do not detect the
incongruence, their attention is not increased and their
looking time does not change.
Limitations and current directions of the
assessment of infant cognition
The use of looking times has provided researchers
with a powerful tool to study perceptual and cognitive
development in infancy. Fascinating findings from
numerous studies using looking times have resulted
in the knowledge that infants, even very early in life,
seem to possess knowledge and concepts about laws of
classical mechanics (e.g., solidity, gravity, continuity),
mathematical procedures (e.g., addition, subtraction),
or psychology (e.g., theory of mind). These fascinating
findings of early competencies have changed our
perception of infants dramatically, which is reflected
in terminology such as the ‘philosophical baby’ or
the ‘competent infant,’ which are frequently used in
the literature, and which have challenged previously
formulated ideas that infants are considered to be born
blind, deaf, and without a feeling of pain.
In what follows, however, it will be emphasized that
as striking as these findings are, it is at the same time
essential to interpret them with great care. First, the
most established measure of looking time is of a very
low spatial and temporal resolution. Over the course
of up to 1 minute, it is assessed whether infants look
at a certain stimulus or not, and rarely is it assessed
where exactly the infant is looking. This makes it
difficult to relate looking-​time data to underlying
processes, a fact that has been discussed in a number
of publications (e.g., Aslin, 2007). Recent technological
advances that make it possible to use methodologies
that are standard in adult experimental psychology
(e.g., electroencephalography [EEG] or eye tracking)
with infant populations have revealed that, for
example, the process of an expectation being violated is
present within the first few hundred milliseconds. The
congruence or incongruence between a pointing hand
and the location of a pointed-​toward stimulus is, for
example, already evident 400 ms after stimulus onset
by a difference in the positive deflection of the brain
response (e.g., the P400; see Gredebäck & Daum, 2015,
for an overview). Similarly, the reaction of the infant’s
pupil diameter differs with respect to the expectancy of
an observed stimulus. Pupil diameter not only differs
with respect to changes in the surrounding light but
also to the cognitive demands of an observed stimulus,
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Cognitive development during infancy  283
resulting in an increase of pupil diameter for observed
unexpected events that is evident within the first few
seconds after stimulus onset. Given that the differences
in the brain and eye signals change rapidly after stimulus
onset and level off quickly, it is questionable exactly
what looking times assess after the first few seconds.
The implications of these differences will be discussed
in greater detail in the section on the dynamics of the
cognitive processing of social events below.
Second, as discussed earlier, infants’ attention is to a
great extent triggered by external events, which easily
bias attention in a particular direction. The reported
preferences primarily reflect the detection of (often
subtle) differences between two conditions. These
differences may be caused by the infants’ knowledge
about the observed event (e.g., whether it was congruent
or incongruent with the infants’ expectation) or by the
level of perceptual differences (e.g., one test event is
perceptually more different/​familiar from the original
event than the other test event). When designing and
interpreting results, one has to be very careful whether
to adopt what is called a ‘rich’ interpretation of the
findings when in fact a ‘lean’ interpretation can just as
readily explain them. While it is safe to say that infants
discriminate between two events through their looking
and acting, one needs to be careful in interpreting what
mechanism is responsible for this discrimination. The
fact that infants look differently at two events does not
necessarily mean that they do understand what the
event actually means from an adult perspective.
There are multiple reasons to consider lean
interpretations when interpreting results from infant
studies. The importance of differentiating between rich
and lean interpretations has been comprehensively
addressed in a recent paper by Heyes (2014). She
reviews a number of different paradigms from the
domain of infant social cognition (see Cohen & Cashon,
2006, for a similar approach with respect to the domain
of object knowledge). Heyes (2014) highlights the fact
that infants are often presented with two test conditions
that differ with respect to how infants might understand
others’ true and false beliefs. However, it is often the case
that the two test events additionally differ in what Heyes
describes as ‘low-​level novelty,’ that is, features such as
colors or slightly different movement patterns, which,
at least in some cases, similarly explain the reported
looking pattern.
On the other hand, infants might respond to a pattern
that is designed to represent a violation of a previously
built expectation but reflects at the same time a pattern
that is more similar to the infant. Take, for example,
a looking-​time study to test infants’ representation of
occluded objects (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman,
1985). In what is one of the most cited and influential
studies in the field, young infants were familiarized with
a screen that was rotated 180 degrees. After habituation,