THE CATEGORIZATION OF ABOVE AND BELOW SPATIAL RELATIONS BY YOUNG INFANTS

3 experiments using the familiarization-novelty preference procedure w ere conducted to investigate whether 3-month-old infants could form ca tegorical representations of the spatial relations above and below. In Experiment 1, one group of infants familiarized with exemplars depict ing a dot in different positions above a horizontal bar displayed a su bsequent visual preference for a novel category exemplar (dot below ba r) that was paired with a familiar category exemplar (dot in novel pos ition above bar). A second group of infants presented with exemplars i n which the dot appeared in variable locations below the bar also resp onded preferentially to a novel category exemplar (dot above bar) when it was paired with a familiar category exemplar (dot in new position below bar). These preferences did not result from the salience of vert ical up-down changes in dot position or the encoding of dot positions relative to an internal horizontal midline (Experiment 3) or from an i nability to discriminate the members of each category (Experiment 2), but rather would seem to be a consequence of the ability to represent categorically the spatial relations above and below. The data provide evidence for early categorical organization in human spatial memory.