Researchers are exploring whether these ubiquitous fluorinated molecules might worsen infections or hamper vaccine effectiveness.
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Edited by Susan E. Carey, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved July 21, 2008 (received for review May 6, 2008)
Abstract
Human teaching, a highly specialized form of cooperative information transmission, depends not only on the presence of benevolent communicators in the environment, but also on the preparedness of the students to learn from communication when it is addressed to them. We tested whether 9-month-old human infants can distinguish between communicative and noncommunicative social contexts and whether they retain qualitatively different information about novel objects in these contexts. We found that in a communicative context, infants devoted their limited memory resources to encoding the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which is preferentially retained in noncommunicative contexts. We propose that infants' sensitivity to, and interpretation of, the social cues distinguishing infant-directed communication events represent important mechanisms of social learning by which others can help determine what information even preverbal human observers retain in memory.
Footnotes
- *To whom correspondence should be addressed at the present address: Department of Psychology, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA. E-mail: jennifer.yoon{at}stanford.edu
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Author contributions: J.M.D.Y., M.H.J., and G.C. designed research; J.M.D.Y. performed research; J.M.D.Y. analyzed data; and J.M.D.Y., M.H.J., and G.C. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0804388105/DCSupplemental.
- © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants
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