“Out of Sight - Out of Mind?” : Object Representation in Early Childhood with Focus on the Ability to Individuate Moving Objects

A consistent pattern of results indicates that from an early age humans are competent to represent objects and characterize them in terms of their properties, their behaviors, as well as their involvement in actions and events. Thereby, infants’ event knowledge not only consists of static information regarding the structure and form of objects but also includes dynamic components. The comprehension of the dynamic aspects of an event is essential in making decisions about the number of objects involved or in judging whether a particular object seen at one time is the same object as one viewed at a previous time. This problem is referred to as object individuation. The study of object individuation demonstrates that infants employ a variety of sources of information in this process. Despite its great importance in early infants’ perceptual and cognitive abilities, one particular source of dynamic information has been unexplored in the occurrence of object individuation. The present work is concerned with the role domain-specific motion plays in infants’ understanding of events and its impact on object individuation. The following four experiments investigated 10- and 12-month-old infants’ ability to recall how many objects were involved in a motion event by means of domain-specific motion cues (animate-inanimate) the objects provided. Using an adapted version of the Xu and Carey (1996) paradigm, 10- and 12-month-old infants saw an animate and an inanimate object repeatedly travel from behind a screen. It was predicted that the distinct motion characteristics would facilitate object individuation by activating underlying conceptual knowledge about the animate-inanimate distinction and thus, generating the expectation of different kinds of objects. In the current set of studies infants of both age groups did not show evidence that they were able to apply such knowledge to the individuation task. Infants did not demonstrate object individuation on the basis of domain-specific motion information by looking longer to an unexpected outcome. It remains to be tested whether it is a question of inability or whether motion information activates different concepts that are employed in the present task. The discussion offers theoretical as well as methodological explanations for the absence of object individuation in the experiments on hand