In the C-not-B task, 2.5-year-old children tend to look for an object in a location to which the hiding agent moved his hand (C) after moving an object from A to B. In three experiments, the authors investigated the nature of the constraints underlying toddlers' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds were tested in a new version…

In one form of category-based induction, people make predictions about unknown properties of objects. There is a tension between predictions made based on the object's specific features (e.g., objects above a certain size tend not to fly) and those made by reference to category-level knowledge (e.g., birds fly). Seven experiments with artificial…

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…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) research suggests that the adult capacity is limited to three or four multifeature object representations. Despite evidence supporting a developmental increase in capacity, it remains unclear what the unit of capacity is in children. The current study employed the change detection paradigm to investigate both the…

Perceiving the orientation of objects is important for interacting with the world, yet little is known about the mental representation or processing of object orientation information. The tendency of humans and other species to confuse mirror images provides a potential clue. However, the appropriate characterization of this phenomenon is not…

The present research examined whether infants as young as 6 months of age would consider what objects a human agent could perceive when interpreting her actions on the objects. In two experiments, the infants took the agent's actions of repeatedly reaching for and grasping one of two possible objects as suggesting her preference for that object…

From a neuropsychological perspective, the cognitive skills of working memory, inhibition, and attention and the maturation of the frontal lobe are requisites for successful A-not-B performance on both the looking and reaching versions of the task. This study used a longitudinal design to examine the developmental progression of infants'…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

This study investigated how young children's increasingly flexible use of spatial reference frames enables accurate search for hidden objects by using a task that 3-year-olds have been shown to perform with great accuracy and 2-year-olds have been shown to perform inaccurately. Children watched as an object was rolled down a ramp, behind a panel…

Three experiments investigated 14-, 18-, and 24- month-old infants' understanding of visual perception. Infants viewed films in which a protagonist was either able to view the location of a hidden object (Visual Access condition) or was blindfolded when the object location was revealed (No Visual Access condition). When requested to find the…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…

Previous researchers have argued that objects associated with a protagonist may be foregrounded, or held active, in memory. This study expanded on previous work by using an inconsistency paradigm to investigate the effects of protagonist association on object accessibility. Readers experienced more processing difficulty when a target sentence…

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"…

Previous research has shown that young children have difficulty searching for a hidden object whose location depends on the position of a partly visible physical barrier. Across four experiments, we tested whether children's search errors are affected by two variables that influence adults' object-directed attention: object boundaries and…