Effects of visual, haptic, and manipulatory experiences on infants' visual recognition memory of objects.

To determine the effects of visual, haptic, and manipulatory experiences on visual recognition of objects' shapes, 108 6-, 9-, and 12-mo-old infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 stimulus familiarization conditions in which they either only looked at an object (visual), looked at and manipulated an object (visual-haptic), or looked at an object encased in a transparent box that the infant manipulated (visual-manipulatory). Visual recognition memory was assessed by the paired-comparison technique in which memory is indexed by infants' differential preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. The major findings were that (a) 12-mo-olds showed evidence of memory in all conditions, (b) younger Ss showed evidence of memory only in the visual condition, and (c) at all ages Ss' preference for novel relative to familiar stimuli was significantly greater in the visual condition than in the visual-haptic and visual-manipulatory conditions, with the latter conditions not differing significantly. It is argued that the manipulatory activity per se depressed Ss' differential preferences in the visual-haptic and visual-manipulatory conditions. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)