Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

Tested 13-, 16-, and 20-month olds' and 24- and 28-month olds' categorization of global- and basic-level object sets composed of prototypical and nonprototypical exemplars. Findings offer new information on the effects of prototypicality and on the process of differentiation of early global categories into more specific basic-level ones. (DR)

The role of context in categorization was examined in four experiments with three month olds. Findings demonstrated that categorization of a novel object is influenced by the context present when the object is initially encountered and by previous encounters with that object in the category context, indicating that infants are capable of…

Three experiments used an object-examining task to explore infants' attention to function and form-function correlations. The results suggested a developmental progression from attending only to the form of objects, to attending to form and function as separate properties, and finally to attending to the relationship between form and function.…