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Learning can be highly adaptive if associations learned in one context are generalized to novel contexts. We examined the development of such generalization in infancy in the context of grouping. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-month-olds and 6- to 7-month-olds were habituated to shapes grouped via the organizational principle of common region and were tested with familiar and novel pairs as determined by the principle of proximity. Older infants generalized from common region to proximity, but younger infants did not. Younger infants failed to generalize when the task was easier (Experiment 2), and their failure was not due to inability to group via proximity (Experiment 3). However, in Experiment 4, even younger infants generalized grouping on the basis of connectedness to proximity. Thus, the ability to transfer learned associations of shapes to novel contexts is evident early in life, although it continues to undergo quantitative change during infancy. Moreover, the operation of this generalization mechanism may be induced by means of bootstrapping onto functional organizational principles, which is consistent with a developmental framework in which core processes scaffold learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research indicates that object perception involves the decomposition of images into parts. A critical principle that governs part decomposition by adults is the short-cut rule, which states that, all else being equal, the visual system parses objects using the shortest possible cuts. We examined whether 6.5-month-olds' parsing of images also follows the short-cut rule. Infants in the experimental conditions were habituated to cross shapes and then tested for their preference between segregated patterns produced using long cuts versus short cuts. Infants in the control conditions were directly tested with the segregated patterns. Infants in the experimental conditions exhibited a greater novelty preference for the long-cut over the short-cut patterns than did those in the control conditions, thereby indicating that they are more likely to segregate cross shapes using short cuts rather than long cuts. This sensitivity to the short-cut rule was evident when two alternative parameters, part area and protrusion, were controlled in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. Thus, a critical principle that governs part segregation in adulthood is operational by 6.5 months of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

lthough several studies have examined infants' sensitivity to perceptual organizational cues, few have examined the functional relations among these cues. We examined how uniform connectedness (UC) functions in relation to shape and luminance similarity. UC has been characterized as the entry-level mechanism of perceptual organization and would therefore be predicted to be more salient than the other two cues. We found that UC was more salient than shape similarity organization was, to the point that 6- to 7-month-old infants failed to even organize on the basis of shape in the presence of UC. Luminance similarity, however, was more salient than UC, even though UC was detected by infants in the presence of luminance cues. We conclude that UC is not necessarily the most salient mechanism of perceptual organization in infancy. Moreover, the luminance-UC-shape salience hierarchy exhibited by 6- to 7-month-olds in the present study is consistent with the order of development of sensitivity to these organizational cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]