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…

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…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

A critical challenge for visual perception is to represent objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Across several areas of cognitive science, researchers have identified cohesion as among the most important theoretical principles of object persistence: An object must maintain a single bounded contour over time. Drawing…

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial…

Two classes of spatial relations can be distinguished in between and within object representations. Kosslyn [Kosslyn, S. M. (1987). "Seeing and imagining in the cerebral hemispheres: A computational approach." "Psychological Review," 94, 148-175] suggested that the right hemisphere (RH) is specialized for processing coordinate (metric) spatial…

The A-not-B task is a marker task for infant development where an infant searches for an object being hidden twice, in two consecutive places. In two studies N = 70 infants plus 40 controls were tested in this task using two separate, infant-sized tables. In the first study, the separate tables were joined in front of the infant to form one area.…

Despite that fact that landmarks play a prominent role in human navigation, experimental evidence on how landmarks are selected and defined by human navigators remains elusive. Indeed, the concept of a "landmark" is itself not entirely clear. In everyday language, the term landmark refers to salient, distinguishable, and usually nameable objects,…

In four experiments, we investigated whether 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the relationship between gaze direction and object location and whether this sensitivity depends on the presence of communicative cues like eye contact. Infants observed a face, which repeatedly shifted its eyes either toward, or away from, unpredictably appearing…

Twenty-four infants were tested monthly for gaze and point following between 9 and 15 months of age and mother-infant free play sessions were also conducted at 9, 12, and 15 months (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998). Using this data set, this study explored relations between maternal talk about mental states during mothers' free play with…

Two studies examined language and understanding of scale models. First, children (N = 16; ages 2;4 to 3;5) received either the "standard" DeLoache model task or a "naming" version (in which children are asked to name the hiding location before retrieving a hidden object). Language ability positively correlated with performance…

In manual search tasks designed to assess infants' knowledge of the object concept, why does search for objects hidden by darkness precede search for objects hidden by visible occluders by several months? A graded representations account explains this decalage by proposing that the conflicting visual input from occluders directly competes with…

The balance between the preservation of early cognitive functions and serious transformations on these functions shifts across time. Piaget's writings, which favored transformations, are being replaced by writings that emphasize continuities between select cognitive functions of infants and older children. The claim that young infants possess…

The present research examined whether 12.5-month-old infants take into account what objects an agent knows to be present in a scene when interpreting the agent's actions. In two experiments, the infants watched a female human agent repeatedly reach for and grasp object-A as opposed to object-B on an apparatus floor. Object-B was either (1) visible…

Finding hidden objects in space is a fundamental ability that has received considerable research attention from both a developmental and a comparative perspective. Tracking the rotational displacements of containers and hidden objects is a particularly challenging task. This study investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and…