Comment on “Infants ’ Perseverative Search Errors Are Induced by Pragmatic Misinterpretation”

errors can be explained by ostensive cues from the experimenter. We use the dynamic field theory to test the proposal that infants encode locations more weakly when social cues are present. Quantitative simulations show that this account explains infants ’ performance without recourse to the theory of natural pedagogy. In the past decade, there has been a prolif-eration of studies examining human infants’early understanding of social pragmatic com-munication (1–4). Topál et al. (5) extended this approach to the study of infants ’ early cognitive abilities using the Piagetian A-not-B paradigm (6). They showed that the presence or absence of ostensive communicative cues from the experi-menter has a dramatic impact on infants ’ search errors: Without social cues, 10-month-old infants perseverate on 41 % of the B trials; with social cues, they perseverate on 81 % of the B trials. Topál et al. used the theory of natural pedagog