Focuses on whether 9- and 12-month-old infants understand that an object has been deleted from its initial hiding place as part of its displacement to a new location. (Author/NH)

Two aspects of the cognitive development of a 14- to 18-month-old blind child are reported: the development of procedures for the intentional control of objects and the development of certain classificatory skills. (Author)

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…

Standardized psychological assessment provides a precise yet limited view of the neuropsychological status of preschool toddlers, whose brain functioning is only beginning to develop localized functioning. Yet, referrals for preschool evaluation of these early-age children often request a wide variety of information about brain-behavior…

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…

Cognition is a general term describing the mental capacities of an animal, and often includes the ability to categorize, remember, and communicate about objects in the environment. Numerous regions of the telencephalon (cerebral cortex and limbic system) are responsible for these cognitive functions. Although many researchers have used traditional…

This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t-sub-0, belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t-sub-1). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this…

The use of gaze shifts as social cues has various evolutionary advantages. To investigate the developmental processes of this ability, we conducted an object-choice task by using longitudinal methods with infant chimpanzees tested from 8 months old until 3 years old. The experimenter used one of six gestures towards a cup concealing food; tapping,…

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)