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…

Evaluated in three experiments a dynamic systems theory account of perseverative errors on "A-not-B" task. Found that 9-month-olds perseverated when reaching for identical targets, but made nonperseverative responses when reaching in the presence of a highly distinctive B target. Reach direction was jointly determined by target's…