Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most infant studies on location memory involve an agent hiding or retrieving the object. Recent work indicates that, foryoung infants, the presence of other agents enhances encoding of the targets of their actions and perceptions, and in apilot study we did not find evidence for location memory with a paradigm where we removed agency cues. Here, wesystematically compared whether 7.5-months-old infants remembered the location of an object better when it was placedthere by an agent compared to a highly similar but non-social setting where a conveyor belt transports the object. Locationmemory was tested through infants’ looking times in response to outcomes showing unexpected vs. expected absences ofthe object. Contrary to our preliminary results, at n=58/64 of this preregistered study we see no main effects of conditionand outcome, as well as no interaction between them (all 95% credible intervals contain 0).