Brief Report: Stability in Infant Rule-Learning?

We tested the stability of infants’ rule learning over a six-months interval in a subsample of N = 86 infants from ManyBabies3 (Visser et al., 2025). Infants completed a gaze-contingent eye-tracking adaptation of the ABA/ABB syllable-triplet task (Marcus et al., 1999) at two time points (T1: 5–12 months; T2: 11–18 months). Rule learning was measured as a novelty preference (greater looking times in rule-inconsistentthan rule-consistent trials). Bayesian analyses provided no evidence of rule learning at either time point and only very weak evidence for longitudinal stability.