Infants' transfer of information from pictures to objects was tested by familiarizing 9-month-olds (N = 31) with either a color or black-and-white photograph of an object and observing their preferential reaching for the real target object versus a distractor. One condition tested object recognition by keeping both objects visible, and the…

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

Sixty infants divided evenly between 5 and 7 months of age were tested for their knowledge of object continuity versus discontinuity with a predictive tracking task. The stimulus event consisted of a moving ball that was briefly occluded for 20 trials. Both age groups predictively tracked the ball when it disappeared and reappeared via occlusion,…

This study investigates the effects of attention-guiding stimuli on 4-month-old infants' object processing. In the human head condition, infants saw a person turning her head and eye gaze towards or away from objects. When presented with the objects again, infants showed increased attention in terms of longer looking time measured by eye…

When hearing a novel name, children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar one, a bias known as disambiguation. Using online processing measures with 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds, we investigate how the development of this bias relates to word learning. Children's proportion of looking time to a novel object after hearing a novel name…

Previous work has demonstrated that infants use object trajectory continuity as a cue to the constant identity of an object, but results are equivocal regarding the role of object features, with some work suggesting that a change in the appearance of an object does not cue a change in identity. In an experiment involving 72 participants, we…

"Object permanence," also known as "object concept" in the field of visual impairment, is one of the most important early developmental milestones. The achievement of object permanence is associated with the onset of representational thought and language. Object permanence is important to orientation, including the recognition of landmarks.…

Three experiments that demonstrate a novel constraint on infants' language skills are described. Across the experiments it is shown that as babies near their 1st birthday, their ability to respond to talk about an absent object is influenced by a referent's spatiotemporal history: familiarizing infants with an object in 1 or several nontest…

In the C-not-B task, 2.5-year-old children tend to look for an object in a location to which the hiding agent moved his hand (C) after moving an object from A to B. In three experiments, the authors investigated the nature of the constraints underlying toddlers' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds were tested in a new version…

In this study, we address the construction of the first symbolic uses of objects in contexts of triadic interaction (adult-child-object). We assume that symbolic productions are based on public rules of the use of objects previously agreed by the community. The first symbols are not rooted in any literal, evident reality, but in shared rules of…

Children and adults often encounter counterintuitive claims that defy their perceptions. We examined factors that influence children's acceptance of such claims. Children ages 3-6 years were shown familiar objects (e.g., a rock), were asked to identify the objects, and were then told that each object was something else (e.g., that the rock…

This paper examines the relative merits of looking time and pupil diameter measures in the study of early cognitive abilities of infants. Ten-month-old infants took part in a modified version of the classic drawbridge experiment used to study object permanence (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The study involved a factorial design where…

This study investigated the ability of preterm infants to learn an object shape with one hand and discriminate a new shape in the opposite hand (without visual control). Twenty-four preterm infants between 33 and 34 + 6 gestational weeks received a tactile habituation task with either their right or left hand followed by a tactile discrimination…

Young infants perceive an object's trajectory as continuous across occlusion provided the temporal or spatial gap in perception is small. In 3 experiments involving 72 participants the authors investigated the effects of different forms of auditory information on 4-month-olds' perception of trajectory continuity. Provision of dynamic auditory…

We investigated whether 6- and 7-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds, as well as adults, process object dimensions independent of or in interaction with one another in a perception and action task by adapting Ganel and Goodale's method for testing adults ("Nature", 2003, Vol. 426, pp. 664-667). In addition, we aimed to confirm Ganel and Goodale's…