The article observes studies of word categorization in 3- to 4-months-old infants questioning their main conclusion that young infants may categorize words themselves. The review shows that there is no bilateral communication between them and adults as well as any perceptual interaction that can help infants acquire language. And yet language…

Infants' understanding of how their actions affect the visibility of hidden objects may be a crucial aspect of the development of search behaviour. To investigate this possibility, 7-month-old infants took part in a two-day training study. At the start of the first session, and at the end of the second, all infants performed a search task with a…

People all over the world are engaging with popular music, particularly through social media platforms, where views are often in the billions and climbing. Sacks (2007), a world-renowned neurologist, coined the term "earworms" to refer to songs that play repetitively in one's head for no apparent reason, sometimes for days, even years,…

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…

Per the Bleaching Syndrome, people of color, including African, Asian, and Latino Americans, are both victims and perpetrators of color discrimination. The Bleaching Syndrome encompasses perceptual, psychological, and behavioral sectors that affect students' schooling experiences. Education professionals, including teachers, administrators, and…

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…

In the first year of life, the ability to search for hidden objects is an indicator of object permanence and, when multiple locations are involved, executive function (i.e. inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory). The current study was designed to examine attentional predictors of search in 5-month-old infants (as measured by the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

"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.…

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…

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,…