Infants know that humans are exempt from some of the principles that govern the motion of inanimate objects: for instance, humans can be caused to move without being struck. In the current study, we report that infants nevertheless do apply some of the same principles to both humans and objects, where appropriate. Five-month-old infants expect…

An important characteristic of mature spatial cognition is the ability to encode spatial locations in terms of relations among landmarks as well as in terms of vectors that include distance and direction. In this study, we examined children's use of the relation "middle" to code the location of a hidden toy, using a procedure adapted…

Eighteen-month-old children performed sorting tasks and their parents completed checklists of words used by the children. Children who performed exhaustive grouping, or grouping of objects of different kinds in different locations, were reported as using more words than children who did not perform exhaustive grouping. (BC)

In three shape-constancy experiments, 4- and 7-year olds viewed a circular disc oriented at a slant. All subjects exaggerated circularity of the disc when they knew the object was a circle. Findings suggest that knowledge of reality contaminates judgments of appearance in circle task and this is the same bias that features in realist errors in…

This study tested participants' preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. Six- and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects as being equally permanent. Adults treated a fantastic object as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects. Results…

The emerging ability to represent an oscillating moving object over occlusions was studied in 7-21-week-old infants. The object moved at 0.25 Hz and was either occluded at the center of the trajectory (for 0.3 s) or at one turning point (for 0.7 s). Each trial lasted for 20 s. Both eye and head movements were measured. By using two kinds of…

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…

Attempts to clarify the meaning of differentiation in the Piagetian concept of object permanence. (BD)

This study tested Piaget's explanation of infants' perseverative error in manual search by comparing searches when the object was (1) hidden, (2) covered but visible, and (3) uncovered. Errors occurred under all three conditions, with conflict at a maximum when the object was hidden. (Author/JMB)

Statistical analysis of many studies on Piaget's stage 4 object concept attempts to synthesize available quantitative data. Factors of this "meta-analysis" include: (1) effects of age; (2) number of A trials; (3) length of delay between hiding and search; (4) number of locations; and (5) visual properties of hiding arrays. Includes…

Investigates the degree to which object familiarity and motivational factors influence infants' search behavior in an object-permanence test. (Author/MP)

This study examined two alternative interpretations of violation-of-expectation findings that young infants can represent hidden objects. Findings indicated that 5-month-olds succeeded in reasoning about the interaction of a visible and a hidden object even though the 2 objects were never simultaneously visible and a 3- or 4-minute delay preceded…

A theory is presented to explain the perception of partially occluded objects and illusory figures, from both static and kinematic information, in a unified framework. This detailed theory of unit formation accounts for most cases of boundary perception in the absence of local physical specification. (SLD)

Recent research on infants' responses to occlusion and containment events indicates that, although some violations of the continuity principle are detected at an early age e.g. Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R. (1999). 2.5-month-old infants' reasoning about when objects should and should not be occluded. Cognitive Psychology 39, 116-157; Hespos, S.…

This study focuses on six leading communication journals and their use of online citations in articles published between 2000 and 2003. The study uses content analysis to explore if there is a relationship between citation characteristics and their stability. The findings show that online citations in the .gov and .org domains are more likely to…