Visual attention both guides and is guided by learning and memory systems. In this article, we use a multiple-memory systems framework to examine the interplay between attention and memory that begins in early postnatal life. We review how attention and memory interact to support infant development with respect to perceptual learning about objects…

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…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

Developmental research suggests that whereas very young infants individuate objects purely on spatiotemporal grounds, from (at latest) around 1 year of age children are capable of individuating objects according to the kind they belong to and the properties they instantiate. As the latter ability has been found to correlate with language, some…

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball…

Investigated the possibility that previous reports of a relation between locomotor status and stage-4 object permanence performance could be generalized to performance on an object localization task. Findings suggest that the effects of locomotor experience on infants' search performance are quite specific and mediated by a variety of factors that…