Recent research suggests that 9-month-old infants tested in a modified version of the A-not-B search task covertly imitate actions performed by the experimenter. The current study examines whether infants also simulate actions performed by mechanical devices, and whether this varies with whether or not they have been familiarized with the devices…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Infants expect objects to be solid and cohesive, and to move on continuous paths through space. In this study, we examine whether infants understand that human beings are material objects, subject to these same principles. We report that 5-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks, but not to people. This…

Two experiments probed 8-month-olds' ability to represent different kinds of entities: rigid, cohesive objects; flexible, cohesive objects; and non-rigid, non-cohesive portions of sand. Results suggest that the processes by which infants individuate and track entities are sensitive to material kind, rigid cohesive objects occupy a privileged…

Tested 4-month-olds' memory for surface feature and location information following brief occlusions. Found that when target objects were images of female faces or monochromatic asterisks, infants increased looking times following changes in identity or color but not changes in location or combinations of feature and location. When objects were…

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-olds could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. Found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct…

This study examined whether 9.5-month-olds could use featural information to individuate objects. Results suggest that infants categorize events involving opaque and transparent occluders as the same kind of situation and that infants are more likely to give evidence of individuation when they need to reason about one kind of event than when they…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Four experiments examined very young infants' expectations about containment events. Found that 2- to 3.5-month-olds recognized that objects could be lowered inside a container with an open but not a closed top. Three-and-a-half-month-olds realized that objects could not pass through the container's back wall and should have moved with it to a new…

Three experiments used a visual fixation technique to examine whether toddlers interpret speech continuously. Found that 24-month-olds had delayed responses when a competing distractor picture's label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset, but not when the pictures' labels rhymed, showing that children monitored speech stream…

Examines evidence that the research community studying infants' object concept and the community concerned with adult object-based attention have been studying the same natural kind. Maintains that the discovery that the object representations of young infants are the same as the object files of mid-level visual cognition has implications for both…