Summary

Infants tend to remember the things that they are much familiar, when it
comes to engaging in conversation about absent things. Though they have a
tendency to pick the new object among a group of familiar and non-familiar
ones, they respond better for referents of familiar things.
In experiment 1, they tested six girls who were approximately 12 months old
with familiar stuffed toy from home and non-familiar new toy from the lab.
Initially the infants were given time to play with the toy and then it was taken
to its identical hiding location, ottomans far from the infants. Then the
infants were engaged in communication about the hidden toy. On contrary to
the expectation of reference to the familiar object, most infants responded to
the non-familiar, new object when it was absent. The new object that was
absent became more attractive to the infants to re-establish contact with the
novel object, which led to the novelty preference hypothesis. Also there was
a possibility of the infants memory about a familiar objects prior location at
home interferes with the ability to respond about the absent reference in the
lab, this led way to the location conflict hypothesis. These hypotheses were
further tested in experiment 2.
In the second experiment, 24 infants of both the genders were tested in
location conflict and no location conflict conditions. Though there was no
impact in the experimental results based on the gender of the infants the
test included the mixture to have representative sample. The location to
familiarise with the toy and main room to discuss about the absent toy were
different in the location conflict condition and both the familiarisation and
main room were kept same in the no location conflict condition. The results
showed that there was an impact in response when the change in location
was involved. Infants responded much better to the toys in the same room
than those they were introduced to in the adjacent room. The novelty
preference hypothesis was tested in the same experiment by timing the
infants response to the new and introduced object when absent in the no
location conflict condition. But the results did not show a significant variation
based on the novelty of the object.
The third experiment was conducted to analyse the response of the infant
about a absent object that was encountered by them several times in
different locations prior to the experiment. The parents car keys were
selected as a familiar object that was given to the infant at several different
locations prior to the experiment. The results of the experiment showed that
they tend to spend more time communicating about the new object that is
absent than the familiar object that is seen in several different locations.

Infants ability to talk about an absent object is affected by the

spatiotemporal history of an object. The relation between language and
cognitive development by showing the infants ability to respond to absent
things relates closely to the perception and memory about the object in
infants mind.