Problem Solving and Perseveration in Infancy . One of the hallmarks of human problem solving is its efficiency . When solutions to problems are known and easily retrieved from memory, we prefer retrieving them over computing them anew. As an illustration, consider the following situation. Despite its many obvious advantages, our tendency to retrieve past solutions from memory has at least one potential drawback.
Past solutions can be helpful only if they are indeed appropriate for the problems at hand.
Infants, like adults, produce perseverative errors, and developmental researchers have long been interested in understanding infants' perseverative tendencies. In this article, we summarize the research we have been conducting over the past five years on the perseverative responses of infants aged 6.5 to 11 months in a variety of tasks. The central perspective of our work, as illustrated by the preceding comments, is that perseveration is best understood as efficient problem solving gone awry. Familiar solutions are retrieved where novel solutions should have been computed. In our research, we used two series of tasks that differ significantly from most of the tasks used in prior research on infant perseveration.