The development of the concept of object permanence was investigated with eight infants with cleft lip/palate and four nonimpaired infants. Superior performance of the cleft lip/palate group was found, possibly due to increased environmental stimulation provided by parents. (DB)

Critically evaluates habituation and related models for studying infant memory, focusing on methodological and substantive limitations which restrict the derivation of information from them. The essay considers existing research on the development of object permanence as an alternative source of information about infant memory. (Author/DB)

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 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…

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

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…

Reports two experiments in which eight patients with organic memory disorders exhibited a pattern of search behavior that resembled mnemonmic precedence--the ability to retrieve an object at an initial location, but not at a new location. (HOD)

Two experiments examined the effects of common motion, background texture, and orientation on four-month olds' perception of unity of a partially occluded rod. Results indicated that infants' perception of object unity is not dependent on a single visual cue but on a variety of cues including motion, interposition, depth cues, background texture,…

Adult and 10- and 12-month olds participated in two experiments to determine reliance of infants on object-kind information in solving problems of object individuation. Findings converge with those of object-first hypothesis of developmental course of object individuation. Findings suggest that young infants may represent one concept as criteria…

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…

Recent work suggests that infants rely on mechanisms of object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Such work shows that infants discriminate arrays containing 1, 2, or 3 objects, but fail with arrays greater than 3 [Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via object-files: Evidence from…

When an object moves behind an occluder and re-emerges, 4-month-old infants perceive trajectory continuity only when the occluder is narrow, raising the question of whether time or distance out of sight is the important constraining variable. One hundred and forty 4-month-olds were tested in five experiments aimed to disambiguate time and distance…

Research over the past 20 years has revealed that even very young infants possess expectations about physical events, and that these expectations undergo significant developments during the first year of life. In this article, I first review some of this research, focusing on infants' expectations about occlusion, containment, and covering events,…

A study was conducted to investigate the degree to which both object familiarity and motivational factors influence infants' search behavior in an object permanence test. Infants' search behavior for an unfamiliar test object was compared with search behavior for (a) an experientially familiar object that each infant had played with daily for a…