Kind matters: A reply to Samuelson and Perone

Abstract

in the article that is a subject of Samuelson and Perone’s commentary, we reported the results of a study in which 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a non-obvious property—a novel sound. We found that infants attempted to elicit the novel sound on test objects that matched the target object in shape, more so than on test objects that matched the target in color or texture. Critically, this pattern of behavior emerged only in a condition in which none of the test objects could actually produce a sound. We concluded that this selective generalization to shape-matched objects reflects infants’ expectation that objects similar in shape share non-obvious properties. In their commentary, Samuelson and Perone (S&P) challenged our interpretation on both empirical and theoretical grounds. In what follows, we respond to these challenges by first addressing incorrect representations of our findings and then discussing the theoretical challenges presented in their commentary.