Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

Two experiments investigated whether 5-month olds would look longer at rotating "drawbridge" appearing to violate physical laws because they knew it was causally impossible. Findings indicated that infants' longer gaze at 180-degree rotations was due to simple perceptual preference for more motion, challenging Baillargeon's (1987) claim…

Three experiments investigated whether 4-month-olds would attend to and utilize the global configuration ("good form") of a partly occluded, moving object to perceive its unit and coherence behind the occluder. Results indicated that curvature per se provided information in support of completion, in addition to global configuration and…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and…

Rejects the neuronal fatigue, or selective adaptation, hypothesis of young infant habituation. Holds that studies cited by Dannemiller and Banks do not support the inferences of selective adaptation. Rejects the hypothetical neurophysiological mechanism of neuronal fatigue. Proposes that studies do not indicate that young infants' visual cortical…

In the past 25 years, there has been an explosion in research on the development of perception. The research has produced discoveries at multiple levels: ecological analyses, models of representation and process, and improved understanding of biological mechanisms. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of infant perception, bringing…

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is…

Examined perception of object unity in partial occlusion in 72 infants. Recorded how long subjects looked at a display of complete and incomplete rods. In test and control conditions, infants looked longer at broken rods than at complete rods, suggesting that infants' cognitive, visual, or attentional skills may be insufficient to support…