Research suggests that, using representations from object-based attention, infants can represent only 3 individuals at a time. For example, infants successfully represent 1, 2, or 3 hidden objects, but fail with 4 ("Developmental Science" 6 (2003) 568), and a similar limit is seen in adults' tracking of multiple objects (see "Cognitive Psychology"…

Chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and bonobos ("Pan paniscus") (Study 1) and 18- and 24-month-old human children (Study 2) participated in a novel communicative task. A human experimenter (E) hid food or a toy in one of two opaque containers before gesturing towards the reward's location in one of two ways. In the Informing condition, she attempted…

Presents a study of decalage between object permanence and person permanence. Decalage was influenced by environmental as well as stimulus factors with infants tested between 6- and 81/4-months/of-age. (BD)

The relationship between the development of object permanence and early words was studied in three young boys, two totally blind from birth and one severely visually impaired. Subjects acquired early words within the age range for sighted children but their word usage was different. The two blind children were delayed in their development of…

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity…

The present research examined alternative accounts of prior violation-of-expectation (VOE) reports that young infants can represent and reason about hidden objects. According to these accounts, young infants' apparent success in these VOE tasks reflects only novelty and familiarity preferences induced by the habituation or familiarization trials…

While very young children's understanding of objects as symbols for other entities has been the focus of much investigation, very little is known concerning the emergence of comprehension for symbolic relations among actions modeled with toy replicas and their real counterparts. We used videotaped depictions of real actions in a preferential…

This study measured infant responses to mother and stranger as a function of mother and stranger distance. A group of 10-month-old infants were pretested for level of object permanence and person permanence, and 18 males and 18 females were chosen as study participants. The infants were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: (1)…

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)

Twenty congenitally blind infants were placed in a panelled framework with various tactile and auditory objects for 20-minute periods. Results indicated that subjects improved their performance of spatially related activities when exposed to an environment helping them understand the concept and permanence of objects and the production of…

Eight experiments were conducted to examine 3- and 3.5-month-old infants' responses to occlusion events. The results revealed two developments, one in infants' knowledge of when objects should and should not be occluded and the other in infants' ability to posit additional objects to make sense of events that would otherwise violate their…

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between high risk infants' sensorimotor development and their use of intentional communications. Twenty-six 20-month-old infants, selected at birth by use of High Risk Index, were studied. At 15 months of age each infant was administered five scales from the Uzgiris-Hunt Ordinal Scales of…

This study explored the relationship between the mother-infant interaction and the concurrent perceptual-cognitive and intellectual status of the infant. One hundred and eight-nine 12-week-old infants were given a battery of perceptual-cognitive tasks, including the Mental Developmental Index (MDI) of the Bayley Scales, the Corman-Escalona Scales…