Accurate representation of a changing environment requires individuation--the ability to determine how many numerically distinct objects are present in a scene. Much research has characterized early individuation abilities by identifying which object features infants can use to individuate throughout development. However, despite the fact that…

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…

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…