A Developmental Study of 9- And 12-Month-Old Infants' Learning From Televised Video

Although infants are exposed to relatively high levels of television the impact of this exposure on learning is not completely known. Research has shown that infants learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. It was hypothesized that providing 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants with active experience with the task objects after a demonstration would increase learning from television. Overall, infants were able to solve means‐end tasks quite well and transfer the modeled solution across several test trials with slightly different tasks. Surprisingly, the results showed that infants learned equally well from the live and video demonstrations and did not show a video deficit effect. In addition, no age differences were found. However, as expected, infants performed much better in the active training conditions compared to the passive conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of the perceptual impoverishment theory and the dual representation theory.