The A-not-B error revisited

We have seen that object permanence is present in infants much earlier than believed by Piaget.
But why do infants not retrieve a hidden object if they are aware of its continued existence? Work
on the A-not-B error can provide an answer to this question. Remember that this error describes
the result that when an object is repeatedly hidden at a location A and then, in full view of the
infant, is hidden at another location B, infants between 9 and 12 months of age continue to
search for it in location A. Piaget argued that the infants has to learn that the object exists
independently of the infant’s own action towards this object and that a central aspect of cognitive
development is to separate the self from the environment.
Further work on the A-not-B error has served to exclude some possible explanations. In
order to see whether the fact that infants repeatedly reach to a location is important, infants just
watched an object being hidden and retrieved at location A without reaching for it themselves.
However, when the object was hidden at location B, infants still reached for A. This result rules
out the explanation that infants merely persevere at a practiced movement, and it also rules out
Piaget’s explanation that the reaching movement to A had become part of the object’s identity.
Another possible explanation concerns infants’ memory for the location. However,
strikingly. Piaget already noted that infants still reach for location A when the object in location
B is not covered at all! This happens as long as there is a cover at location A (Bremmer & Knowles,
1984). Therefore, the error cannot be due to infants’ memory limitations where they forget that
the object is now hidden in location B.
An explanation that is based on brain development has been suggested by Diamond
(1988). The frontal cortex is involved in planning and guiding actions (so-called executive
functions). This part of the brain matures very slowly and is not fully developed until adolescence.
Diamond argued that it is the immaturity of the frontal cortex that leads to the A-not-B error.
According to her view, frontal cortex is responsible both for the maintenance of object
representations and for the inhibition of incorrect responses. In order to succeed at the A-not-B
task it is necessary to do both. In the immature cortex of infants these functions are not fully
developed and, although the infants can do one or the other, they are incapable of doing them
both together. They therefore cannot use their memory of the hidden object to suppress their
search response at location A. This explanation is an advance on other theories in that it combines
memory and perseveration accounts and bases them in what is known about infant brain
development. However, as we have seen, infants also reach for B when they only watched the
object at A without reaching for it, and Diamond’s account cannot explain this result. This is
because her account also relies on infants’ inability to inhibit a previously learned response.
A more convincing explanation of the A-not-B error has been provided by Smith and
Thelen (2003). They used the dynamic systems framework to explain how the real-time
interactions between external factors and the internal state of the infants lead to the search
error. According to their theory, the two hiding locations stand in competition with each other.
When the experimenter repeatedly hides the object at location A this location becomes more
highlighted because the visual cue is strengthened by the infant’s memory of the reaching there.
The more A-trials there are the stronger this preference becomes. When then the object is hidden
in location B the new visual cue competed with the previously established memory cue.
Importantly, whereas the visual cue (hiding the object at location B) decays once the object is
hidden, the memory cue retains its strength and eventually wins out – the infant reaches to
location A.
This theory predicts that if infants are allowed to search without a delay, immediately
after the object is hidden at location B, they should correctly search at B because the strong visual
cue dominates the memory cue. This is exactly what happens (Wellman, Cross, Bartsch, & Harris,
1986). The theory also predicts that the error depends on the interaction of several aspects of
the task, for example the attention-grabbing properties of the covers under which the object is
hidden and of the hiding event, the delay between hiding and searching, and the number of trials
where the object is hidden at location A. These predictions appear to be borne out by many
experiments (Smith & Thelen, 2003). Another prediction is that infants should search correctly if
searching at A is made different from searching at B, because the memory of the A event then
exerts less influence over the new B event. In one study (Smith, Thelen, Titzer, & Mclin, 1999),

infants were sitting during the A trials and were then stood up for the B trial(see the photo).
In this case, even eight- and ten-months-olds searched correctly at B, performing as if they were
four months older. Similar results were found when infants wore weighted wrist bands either for
the A or the B trials: making the bodily experience of reaching different with light vs. heavy arms
made the A and B trials sufficiently different that ten-months-olds searched at the correct B
location.
 It is clear that this dynamic systems view is fundamentally different from Piaget’s
explanation of the infant not representing the object as separate from the action towards it. In
the dynamic systems view the action of the infant is the outcome of a combination of the
perceptual cues (what the covers look like, how the hiding action was performed), the past
actions of the infant, the similarity of past to present bodily experience and the delay between
hiding the object and reaching for it. Developmental change in this view emerges from a re-
weighting of the importance of cues: 12-month-old infants may be better able to sustain the
perceptual cue of the object being hidden at location B so that the previous embodied memories
for location A do not over-ride them as easily. Again, this ability depends on the cues on the
scene. When the A-not-B task is done in a sandbox where no lids for the two hiding locations are
visible, even two-year-olds still make the error (Butler, Berthier, & Clifton, 2002).
It appears that a dynamic systems view of the A-not-B error not only explains its origins,
but also successfully predicts how infants’ successes and failures in this task can be manipulated
by changing one or several of many interacting factors in the environment and in the infant’s
prior experience.

UNDERSTANDING NUMEROSITY
Since Baillargeon’s drawbridge study many violation-od-expectation studies have explored young
infants’ relatively sophisticated knowledge of objects and events. Another well-known study
investigated infants’ ability to represent small numbers precisely and to add and substract.