Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide…

Infants' pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants' pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18-month-olds, but not…

In this study, we address the construction of the first symbolic uses of objects in contexts of triadic interaction (adult-child-object). We assume that symbolic productions are based on public rules of the use of objects previously agreed by the community. The first symbols are not rooted in any literal, evident reality, but in shared rules of…

Infants' transfer of information from pictures to objects was tested by familiarizing 9-month-olds (N = 31) with either a color or black-and-white photograph of an object and observing their preferential reaching for the real target object versus a distractor. One condition tested object recognition by keeping both objects visible, and the…

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose…

Recent research on infants' responses to occlusion and containment events indicates that, although some violations of the continuity principle are detected at an early age e.g. Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R. (1999). 2.5-month-old infants' reasoning about when objects should and should not be occluded. Cognitive Psychology 39, 116-157; Hespos, S.…

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…

How do infants come to understand references to absent objects? 14-month-old infants first learned a name for a novel toy, which was then placed out of view. The infants who listened to a story mentioning the nonvisible object, looked, pointed, and searched for it more often than did infants who heard a story using a different name. Their behavior…

The present research investigated whether 13.5-month-old infants would attribute to an actor a disposition to perform a recurring action, and would then use this information to predict which of two new objects--one that could be used to perform the action and one that could not--the actor would grasp next. During familiarization, the infants…

Investigates whether 6- to 12-month-old infants' exposure to the successful search behavior of a sibling in two object-concept tasks would enhance infants' subsequent performance on these tasks. (HOD)

When and in what ways do infants recognize humans as intentional actors? An important aspect of this larger question concerns when infants recognize specific human actions (e.g. a reach) as object-directed (i.e. as acting toward goal-objects). In two studies using a visual habituation technique, 12-month-old infants were tested to assess their…