Recent studies in neuroimagery and cognitive psychology support the view of sensory-motor based knowledge: when processing an object concept, neural systems would re-enact previous experiences with this object. In this experiment, a conceptual switching cost paradigm derived from Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou (2003, 2004) was used to…

We investigated whether 6- and 7-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds, as well as adults, process object dimensions independent of or in interaction with one another in a perception and action task by adapting Ganel and Goodale's method for testing adults ("Nature", 2003, Vol. 426, pp. 664-667). In addition, we aimed to confirm Ganel and Goodale's…

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult's verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

If after teaching a label for 1 object, a speaker does not name a nearby object, 3-year-olds tend to reject the label for the nearby object (W.E. Merriman, J.M. Marazita, L.H. Jarvis, J.A. Evey-Burkey, and M. Biggins, 1995a). In Studies 1 (5-year-olds) and 3 (3-year-olds), this effect depended on object similarity. In Study 2, when a speaker used…

In two experiments on very young children's response to the orientation of pictures and objects, 18-, 24- and 30-month-old children showed no preference for upright pictures over inverted ones. More importantly, we found that children in all three age groups were equally accurate and equally fast at identifying depicted objects regardless of…

Research on children's understanding of video has shown seeming contradictions. Fourteen-month-olds imitate actions seen on TV (Meltzoff, 1988) and 18-month-olds are reminded of an event by watching video (Sheffield & Hudson, 2003) but 24-month-olds fail at a video-mediated object-retrieval task requiring dual representational understanding…

A series of studies focused on (1) the evolution of the notion of identity of objects among infants up to 15 months of age and (2) the changing rules by which this development may be understood. Six identity tasks were presented to 60 infants divided into five age groups: 5, 7, 9, 12, and 15 months. Two objects were used in all tasks. In the first…

Experiment one tested 9- and 16-month-old children on a modification of Piaget's Stage IV object permanence task, examining infants' use of information from previous experiences with an object and from a recent hiding to locate a hidden object. In experiment two, two-, two-and-a-half-, and four-year-old children additionally received verbal…

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that…

Nine- to 18-month-old infants were presented with simple two-location manual search tasks involving invisible displacements of objects with sequence of displacements occurring before infants search. Results provided insights into age differences associated with development of logical search strategies, information-processing skills, and temporal…

Observed the reactions of 3.5-month-old infants looking at a carrot that should have but did not appear in a window after passing behind a screen. The results of this and several similar experiments indicated that 3.5-month-old infants are able to represent and reason about hidden objects. (BC)

Examines perceptions of adults compared with preschool children in assuming object permanence or discontinuity of existence when an object is removed from their immediate perceptual field. Results showed that a belief in the possibility of the discontinuity of material objects is not unique to the minds of preschool children but can also be…

How do infants individuate and track objects, and among them objects belonging to their species, when they can only rely on information about the properties of those objects? We propose the Human First Hypothesis (HFH), which posits that infants possess information about their conspecifics and use it to identify and count objects. F. Xu and S.…