Reflects on Needham's findings on infants' object recognition and segregation. Examines the role for perceptual bias in explaining infant performance, places Needham's studies in historical perspective, and assesses their theoretical significance. Discusses the merits of positing different kinds of information sources for object segregation, and…

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

Discusses Needham's findings that infants individuate objects by feature, within the framework of brain mechanisms that index or track individual objects, drawing upon theories of attention and working memory developed in the study of adults. Considers Needham's work as contributing to an understanding of categorization and the effect of object…

Contrary to the basic-level restraint hypothesis, which suggests that young children learn basic-level words more easily than specific-level words, these five studies show that although other constraints on word meaning may be in place, children are flexible in interpreting new words at different hierarchical levels. (MDM)