Perseveration in Barrier Crossing Mark A. Schmuckler University of Toronto Scarborough The phenomenon of response perseveration has captivated psychologists for years, with the majority of theories of this effect focusing primarily on the cognitive, spatially oriented nature of this behavior. The current project examined whether response perseveration would also occur within a task requiring little cognitive spatial resources— barrier crossing. Across three experiments, significant response persevera- tion was observed in toddlers’ choices of which side of a barrier to cross. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrated the basic effect of response perseveration in barrier crossing, Experiment 2 showed that perseveration would continue even when the chosen side was more difficult to cross than the nonchosen side, and Experiment 3 demonstrated that perseverations were based on an environment-centered reference frame, as opposed to a body-centered reference frame. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theoretical accounts of response perseveration specifically, and with regard to perceptual-motor relations more generally. Keywords: perseveration, barrier crossing, A-not-B, visually guided locomotion, perceptual-motor interaction The phenomenon of response perseveration has captivated psychologists for decades. In a recent historical analysis, Stark (2007) traces the concept, and use, of the word “perseveration” to C. Neisser in 1895, who suggested this term to capture the notion of “getting stuck” on something. Based on her historical analysis, Stark goes on to formalize and define perseveration as “a phenomenon whereby the subject unintentionally produces or gets stuck on an information unit, a particular linguistic form or action unit, which he or she has previously produced or at some level has heard, that is, auditorily processed, or seen that is, visually processed” (p. 932). Over the years, this notion of perseveration has generally remained consistent, with research- ers examining the occurrence of perseveration across a wide array of speech and verbal (Buckingham, 2007; Buckingham & Buckingham, 2011; Cohen & Dehaene, 1998; Martin & Dell, 2004, 2007; Sandson & Albert, 1984, 1987; Stark, 2007, for reviews) and attention (Goldberg, 1986; Kim et al., 2009; Kurshid, Longin, Crucian, & Barrett, 2009; Na et al., 1999, 2000; Sandson & Albert, 1987) domains. Such work has gen- erally focused on the repetitive behavior of patient populations who have suffered some form of injury to the cerebral cortex (see Buckingham, 2007, for a review). Within child development, the concept of perseveration has similarly fascinated researchers over the years. Probably the most famous developmental example of perseveration can be seen in Piaget’s (1954) classic A-not-B task (Bremner, 1978a, 1978b; Bremner & Bryant, 1977; Bremner, Knowles, & An- dreasen, 1994; Butterworth, 1975, 1977; Diamond, 1985; Dia- mond, Cruttenden, & Neiderman, 1994; Evans & Gratch, 1972; Gratch, Appel, Evans, LeCompte, & Wright, 1974; Gratch & Landers, 1971; Harris, 1973, 1974, 1977; Horobin & Acredolo, 1986; Marcovitch & Zelazo, 1999, 2006, 2009; Sophian & Wellman, 1983; Wellman, Cross, & Bartsch, 1987). In this task, children watch as an experimenter hides a desired object in one of two locations (the A location) and are then motivated to retrieve the object from this hiding place. Following a (vari- able) number of successful retrievals of the hidden object, the experimenter then, in full view of the children, hides the object in a second location (the B location) and once again prompts children to retrieve the hidden object. Typically, and counter- intuitively, children of a certain age (roughly between 8 and 19 months) perseverate in their response, searching for, and failing to find, the object in the previous (A) location. What makes this behavior so fascinating to developmentalists is that children’s errors persist, despite the fact that they have a great deal of information concerning what would have been a successful response but, for whatever reason, fail to use this information. Given the rather dramatic nature of this behavior, the classic A-not-B paradigm has given birth to a huge number of exper- imental investigations, as well as a wide range of theoretical explanations and frameworks (see Marcovitch & Zelazo, 1999, and Wellman et al., 1987, for meta-analytic reviews). Empirical work on this question has examined a large number of manip- ulations of this paradigm, including investigating age differ- ences in the A-not-B error (Butterworth, 1975; Diamond, 1985; This article was published Online First January 21, 2013. Mark A. Schmuckler, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. This work was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the author. I thank Anna Maria Catanzaro for her work on the initial stages of this project, and members of the Laboratory for Infant Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough for their assistance in running these studies, along with Sarah Berger, Amy Joh, and one anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments on this work. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark A. Schmuckler, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarbor- ough, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, ON, Canada M1C 1A4. E-mail: marksch@utsc.utoronto.ca This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 39, No. 4, 1100 –1123 0096-1523/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0031119 1100