There is considerable evidence that presentation of stimuli in parallel rather than serially facilitates infant’ learning, memory, and categorization because it allows for comparison of those stimuli (e.g., Fagan, 1978 and Rose et al., 1982), and it does so in the object-examining task used here (Oakes & Ribar, 2005). Thus, the current experiment was designed to examine whether presentation of the stimuli in parallel during the test trials would lead 9-month-olds to learn second-order correlations. The experiment was identical to Experiment 1 except for the test phase in which pairs of stimuli were presented instead of a single stimulus. It was hypothesized that if 9-month-old infants are in a transition phase between a familiarity and a novelty preference, then making the test phase easier could induce them to demonstrate a novelty preference for the inconsistent test object.
3.1 Method