When less is more: how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support.

Two experiments explored how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., on) when habituated to few (i.e., 2) or many (i.e., 6) examples of the relation. When habituated to 2 pairs of objects in a support relation, 14-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds, formed the abstract spatial category (i.e., generalized the relation to novel objects). When habituated to 6 object pairs in a support relation, infants did not attend to the relation. The results indicate that infants learn to form an abstract spatial category of support between 10 and 14 months and that having fewer object pairs depicting this relation facilitates their acquisition of the abstract categorical representation.