| dc.contributor.author | MacPherson, Amy Christine. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:36:48Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2006 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2006 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINR16726 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/54817 | |
| dc.description | Describes three variations on a procedure devised by Tomasello and Haberl (2003) to assess infants' understanding of what is new (and presumably interesting) to another person. Their claim was that both eighteen- and twelve-month-olds could figure out what was new to another person on the basis of prior knowledge that people tend to get excited about things that are new to them and on immediate past experience that a particular object was new to the experimenter. The present research was undertaken with some scepticism about the ability of infants as young as twelve months to understand the intentional relations of others to the extent asserted by Tomasello and Haberl. Experiment I sought to replicate and extend their findings with twelve- and eighteen-month-olds in three conditions: a New to Experimenter---Absent Condition (in which the experimenter left the room during presentation of the target object), a New to Experimenter---Present Condition (in which the experimenter watched the interaction with the target object from across the room), and a New to Baby Condition (specific to the present research; in which the experimenter played with a toy across the room from the baby). Eighteen-month-olds in the NE-P and NB Conditions, but not the NE-A Condition, gave or chose the target object significantly more often than expected by chance, while twelve-month-olds showed only a trend in that direction. Experiment 2 pitted the NB and NE-P Conditions against each other to differentiate between twelve- and eighteen-month-olds. Indeed, twelve-month-olds tended to choose the NB object while eighteen-month-olds chose the two significant objects (i.e., the NB and NE-P objects) with almost equal frequency. Twenty-four-month-olds were expected to round out the developmental story by choosing the NE-P object most often, while in actual fact they behaved more like the twelve-month-olds. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 with one major difference: the objects to choose from in the final request procedure included only the NE-P object and the distracters. The results of Experiment 3 were inconclusive. These findings are discussed in terms of infants' understanding of the intentional relations of others as independent from their own. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2006. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Psychology, Developmental. | en_US |
| dc.title | New to me or new to you? Determining objects of interest on the basis of novelty in the second year of life. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
