Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

Language Learning and Development

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 4-46

  Baillargeon, Renée ^a   Stavans, Maayan ^a   Wu, Di ^a   Gertner, Yael ^a   Setoh, Peipei ^a   Kittredge, Audrey K ^a   Bernard, Amélie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84855919267     PISSN: 15475441     EISSN: 15473341     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2012.630610     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. Aguiar, A. and Baillargeon, R. 1999. 2.5-month-old infants' reasoning about when objects should and should not be occluded. Cognitive Psychology, 39: 116-157.
2. Aguiar, A. and Baillargeon, R. 2002. Developments in young infants' reasoning about occluded objects. Cognitive Psychology, 45: 267-336.
3. Baillargeon, R. 1994. Physical reasoning in young infants: Seeking explanations for unexpected events. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12: 9-33.
4. Baillargeon, R. 2002. "The acquisition of physical knowledge in infancy: A summary in eight lessons". In Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development, 1st, Edited by: Goswami, U. 46-83. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
5. Baillargeon, R. 2008. Innate ideas revisited: For a principle of persistence in infants' physical reasoning. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3: 2-13.
6. Baillargeon, R. and Carey, S. in press. "Core cognition and beyond: The acquisition of physical and numerical knowledge". In Early childhood development and later achievement, Edited by: Pauen, S. and Bornstein, M. London, England: Cambridge University Press.
7. Baillargeon, R. and DeVos, J. 1991. Object permanence in 3.5- and 4.5-month-old infants: Further evidence. Child Development, 62: 1227-1246.
8. Baillargeon, R., Li, J., Gertner, Y. and Wu, D. 2011. "How do infants reason about physical events?". In The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development, 2nd, Edited by: Goswami, U. 11-48. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
9. Baillargeon, R., Li, J., Ng, W. and Yuan, S. 2009a. "An account of infants' physical reasoning". In Learning and the infant mind, Edited by: Woodward, A. and Needham, A. 66-116. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
10. Baillargeon, R., Needham, A. and DeVos, J. 1992. The development of young infants' intuitions about support. Early Development and Parenting, 1: 69-78.
11. Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E. S. and Wasserman, S. 1985. Object permanence in 5-month-old infants. Cognition, 20: 191-208.
12. Baillargeon, R., Wu, D., Yuan, S., Li, J. and Luo, Y. 2009b. "Young infants' expectations about self-propelled objects". In The origins of object knowledge, Edited by: Hood, B. and Santos, L. 285-352. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
13. Balaban, M. T. and Waxman, S. R. 1997. Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants?. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64: 3-26.
14. Bernard, A., Baillargeon, R. and DeJong, G. F. March 2011. Going beyond statistical regularities: Evidence for causal reasoning in infants, March, Montreal, Canada: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
15. Bonatti, L., Frot, E. and Mehler, J. 2005. What face inversion does to infants' numerical abilities. Psychological Science, 16: 506-510.
16. Bonatti, L., Frot, E., Zangl, R. and Mehler, J. 2002. The human first hypothesis: Identification of conspecifics and individuation of objects in the young infant. Cognitive Psychology, 44: 388-426.
17. Casasola, M., Cohen, L. B. and Chiarello, E. 2003. Six-month-old infants' categorization of containment spatial relations. Child Development, 74: 679-693.
18. Cheries, E., Wynn, K. and Scholl, B. 2006. Interrupting infants' persisting object representations. An object-based limit? Developmental Science, 9: F50-F58.
19. Csibra, G. 2008. Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.5-month-old infants. Cognition, 107: 705-717.
20. DeJong, G. F. 1997. "Explanation-based learning". In Encyclopedia of computer science, Edited by: Tucker, A. 499-520. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
21. Dewar, K. and Xu, F. 2009. Do early nouns refer to kinds or distinct shapes?. Psychological Science, 20: 252-257.
22. Eimas, P. D. and Quinn, P. C. 1994. Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. Child Development, 65: 903-917.
23. Feigenson, L. and Carey, S. 2005. On the limits of infants' quantification of small object arrays. Cognition, 97: 295-313.
24. Feigenson, L. and Halberda, J. 2004. Infants chunk object arrays into sets of individuals. Cognition, 91: 173-190.
25. Fiser, J. and Aslin, R. N. 2002. Statistical learning of new visual feature combinations by infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99: 15822-15826.
26. Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R. and Yuan, S. 2010. Syntactic bootstrapping. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1: 143-149.
27. Futó, J., Téglás, E., Csibra, G. and Gergely, G. 2010. Communicative function demonstration induces kind-based artifact representation in preverbal infants. Cognition, 117: 1-8.
28. Gelman, R. 1990. First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant data: Number and the animate-inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science, 14: 79-106.
29. German, T. P. and Defeyter, M. A. 2000. Immunity to functional fixedness in young children. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7: 707-712.
30. Gertner, Y., Baillargeon, R., Fisher, C. L. and Simons, D. J. April 2009. Language facilitates infants' physical reasoning, April, Denver, CO: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
31. Graham, S. A., Kilbreath, C. S. and Welder, A. N. 2004. 13-month-olds rely on shared labels and shape similarity for inductive inferences. Child Development, 75: 409-427.
32. Hespos, S. J. and Baillargeon, R. 2001a. Infants' knowledge about occlusion and containment events: A surprising discrepancy. Psychological Science, 12: 141-147.
33. Hespos, S. J. and Baillargeon, R. 2001b. Knowledge about containment events in very young infants. Cognition, 78: 207-245.
34. Hespos, S. J. and Baillargeon, R. 2006. Décalage in infants' knowledge about occlusion and containment events: Converging evidence from action tasks. Cognition, 99: B31-B41.
35. Hespos, S. J. and Baillargeon, R. 2008. Young infants' actions reveal their developing knowledge of support variables: Converging evidence for violation-of-expectation findings. Cognition, 107: 304-316.
36. Huttenlocher, J., Duffy, S. and Levine, S. C. 2002. Infants and toddlers discriminate amount: Are they measuring?. Psychological Science, 13: 244-249.
37. Johnson, S. C., Shimizu, Y. A. and Ok, S.-J. 2007. Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants' attribution of goals. Cognitive Development, 22: 310-322.
38. Kahneman, D., Treisman, A. and Gibbs, B. J. 1992. The reviewing of object files: Object-specific integration of information. Cognitive Psychology, 24: 174-219.
39. Keil, F. C. 1995. "The growth of causal understandings of natural kinds". In Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate, Edited by: Sperber, D., Premack, D. and Premack, A. J. 234-262. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
40. Kibbe, M. M. and Leslie, A. M. in press. "What do infants remember when they forget? Location and identity in 6-month-olds' memory for objects". In Psychological Science
41. Kingo, O. S. and Krøjgaard, P. 2011. Object manipulation facilitates kind-based object individuation of shape-similar objects. Cognitive Development, 26: 87-103.
42. Kittredge, A. K. and Baillargeon, R. March 2011. Do infants attend to object shape in a novel physical event?, March, Montreal, Canada: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
43. Kochukhova, O. and Gredebäck, G. 2007. Learning about occlusion: Initial assumptions and rapid adjustments. Cognition, 105: 26-46.
44. Kotovsky, L. and Baillargeon, R. 1998. The development of calibration-based reasoning about collision events in young infants. Cognition, 67: 311-351.
45. Krøjgaard, P. 2000. Object individuation in 10-month-old infants: Do significant objects make a difference?. Cognitive Development, 15: 169-184.
46. Leslie, A. M. 1995. "A theory of agency". In Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate, Edited by: Sperber, D., Premack, D. and Premack, A. J. 121-141. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
47. Leslie, A. M. and Chen, M. L. 2007. Individuation of pairs of objects in infancy. Developmental Science, 10: 423-430.
48. Leslie, A. M. and Keeble, S. 1987. Do six-month-old infants perceive causality?. Cognition, 25: 165-288.
49. Leslie, A. M., Xu, F., Tremoulet, P. and Scholl, B. 1998. Indexing and the object concept: Developing 'what' and 'where' systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2: 10-18.
50. Li, J. and Baillargeon, R. 2012. Evidence for the persistence principle: Static priming effects in violation-of-expectation and preferential-reaching tasks, Manuscript in preparation.
51. Li, J., Baillargeon, R. and Needham, A. 2012. How do young infants form event categories? The case of support events, Manuscript in preparation.
52. Li, J., Sigmon-Hernandez, R. and Baillargeon, R. March 2010. Infants' reasoning about a sequence of events from distinct categories: Spatiotemporal-based carryover effects, March, Baltimore, MD: Paper presented at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies.
53. Li, X., Stavans, M., Baillargeon, R., Carey, S. and Bonatti, L. 2012. Object individuation in 9.5-month-old infants: Category-based priming effects, Manuscript in preparation.
54. Luo, Y. and Baillargeon, R. 2005. When the ordinary seems unexpected: Evidence for rule-based physical reasoning in young infants. Cognition, 95: 297-328.
55. Luo, Y. and Baillargeon, R. 2012. Infants' reasoning about transparent occluders and containers, Manuscript in preparation.
56. Luo, Y., Baillargeon, R., Brueckner, L. and Munakata, Y. 2003. Reasoning about a hidden object after a delay: Evidence from robust representations in 5-month-old infants. Cognition, 88: B23-B32.
57. Luo, Y., Kaufman, L. and Baillargeon, R. 2009. Young infants' reasoning about events involving inert and self-propelled objects. Cognitive Psychology, 58: 441-486.
58. Mareschal, D. and Johnson, M. H. 2003. The "what" and "where" of object representations in infancy. Cognition, 88: 259-276.
59. McCrink, K. and Wynn, K. 2004. Large-number addition and subtraction in infants. Psychological Science, 15: 776-781.
60. McDonough, L., Choi, S. and Mandler, J. M. 2003. Spatial categorization: Flexible infants, lexical adults. Cognitive Psychology, 46: 229-259.
61. Moore, D. S. and Johnson, S. P. 2008. Mental rotation in human infants: A sex difference. Psychological Science, 19: 1063-1066.
62. Needham, A. and Baillargeon, R. 1993. Intuitions about support in 4.5-month-old infants. Cognition, 47: 121-148.
63. Needham, A. and Baillargeon, R. 2000. Infants' use of featural and experiential information in segregating and individuating objects: A reply to Xu, Carey, and Welch (1999). Cognition, 74: 255-284.
64. Needham, A., Cantlon, J. F. and Ormsbee Holley, S. M. 2006. Infants' use of category knowledge and object attributes when segregating objects at 8.5 months of age. Cognitive Psychology, 53: 345-360.
65. Needham, A., Dueker, G. L. and Lockhead, G. 2005. Infants' formation and use of categories to segregate objects. Cognition, 94: 215-240.
66. Newcombe, N. S., Huttenlocher, J. and Learmonth, A. E. 1999. Infants' coding of location in continuous space. Infant Behavior and Development, 22: 483-510.
67. Ng, W., Baillargeon, R. and Wilcox, T. March 2007. 8.5-month-old infants use pattern but not color information to individuate objects in occlusion events, March, Boston, MA: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
68. Oakes, L. M., Ross-Sheehy, S. and Luck, S. J. 2006. Rapid development of feature binding in visual short-term memory. Psychological Science, 17: 781-787.
69. Onishi, K. H. 2012. Perception of event roles in infancy, Manuscript in preparation.
70. Pylyshyn, Z. W. 1989. The role of location indexes in spatial perception: A sketch of the FINST spatial index model. Cognition, 32: 65-97.
71. Quinn, P. C. 2007. "On the infant's prelinguistic conception of spatial relations: Three developmental trends and their implications for spatial language learning". In The emerging spatial mind, Edited by: Plumert, J. M. and Spencer, J. P. 117-141. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
72. Quinn, P. C., Eimas, P. D. and Rosenkrantz, S. L. 1993. Evidence for representations of perceptually similar natural categories by 3- and 4-month-old infants. Perception, 22: 463-475.
73. Quinn, P. C. and Liben, L. S. 2008. A sex difference in mental rotation in young infants. Psychological Science, 19: 1067-1070.
74. Rivera, S. M. and Zawaydeh, A. N. 2006. Word comprehension facilitates object individuation in 10- and 11-month-old infants. Brain Research, 1146: 146-157.
75. Rose, S. A., Feldman, J. and Jankowski, J. J. 2001. Visual short-term memory in the first year of life: Capacity and recency effects. Developmental Psychology, 37: 539-549.
76. Rose, S. A., Gottfried, A. W., Melloy-Carminar, P. and Bridger, W. H. 1982. Familiarity and novelty preferences in infant recognition memory: Implications for information processing. Developmental Psychology, 18: 704-713.
77. Saffran, J. R. 2009. "What can statistical learning tell us about infant learning?". In Learning and the infant mind, Edited by: Woodward, A. and Needham, A. 29-46. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
78. Saxe, R., Tzelnic, T. and Carey, S. 2006. Five-month-old infants know humans are solid, like inanimate objects. Cognition, 101: B1-B8.
79. Saxe, R., Tzelnic, T. and Carey, S. 2007. Knowing who-dunnit: Infants identify the causal agent in an unseen causal interaction. Developmental Psychology, 43: 149-158.
80. Schweinle, A. and Wilcox, T. 2004. Sex differences in infants' ability to represent complex event sequences. Infancy, 6: 333-359.
81. Setoh, P. and Baillargeon, R. March 2011. How do infants generalize new physical expectations?, March, Montreal, Canada: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
82. Simon, T., Hespos, S. J. and Rochat, P. 1995. Do infants understand simple arithmetic? A replication of Wynn (1992). Cognitive Development, 10: 253-269.
83. Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J. and Jacobson, K. 1992. Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, 99: 605-632.
84. Spelke, E. S., Kestenbaum, R., Simons, D. J. and Wein, D. 1995a. Spatiotemporal continuity, smoothness of motion, and object identity in infancy. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13: 113-142.
85. Spelke, E. S., Phillips, A. and Woodward, A. L. 1995b. "Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action". In Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate, Edited by: Sperber, D., Premack, D. and Premack, A. J. 44-78. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
86. Strickland, B. and Scholl, B. J. 2012. Visual perception involves "event type" representations, The case of containment vs. occlusion. Manuscript under review.
87. Surian, L. and Caldi, S. 2010. Infants' individuation of agents and inert objects. Developmental Science, 13: 143-150.
88. Valenza, E. and Bulf, H. 2011. Early development of object unity: Evidence for perceptual completion in newborns. Developmental Science, 14: 799-808.
89. von Hofsten, C., Kochukova, O. and Rosander, K. 2007. Predictive tracking over occlusions by 4-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 10: 625-640.
90. Wang, S. and Baillargeon, R. 2005. Inducing infants to detect a physical violation in a single trial. Psychological Science, 16: 542-549.
91. Wang, S. and Baillargeon, R. 2006. Infants' physical knowledge affects their change detection. Developmental Science, 9: 173-181.
92. Wang, S. and Baillargeon, R. 2008a. Can infants be "taught" to attend to a new physical variable in an event category? The case of height in covering events. Cognitive Psychology, 56: 284-326.
93. Wang, S. and Baillargeon, R. 2008b. Detecting impossible changes in infancy: A three-system account. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12: 17-23.
94. Wang, S., Baillargeon, R. and Brueckner, L. 2004. Young infants' reasoning about hidden objects: Evidence from violation-of-expectation tasks with test trials only. Cognition, 93: 167-198.
95. Wang, S., Baillargeon, R. and Paterson, S. 2005. Detecting continuity violations in infancy: A new account and new evidence from covering and tube events. Cognition, 95: 129-173.
96. Wang, S. and Kohne, L. 2007. Visual experience enhances infants' use of task-relevant information in an action task. Developmental Psychology, 43: 1513-1522.
97. Wang, S. and Mitroff, S. R. 2009. Preserved visual representations despite change blindness in 11-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 12: 681-687.
98. Waxman, S. R. 1999. Specifying the scope of 13-month-olds' expectations for novel words. Cognition, 70: B35-B50.
99. Welder, A. N. and Graham, S. A. 2001. The influence of shape similarity and shared labels on infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties. Child Development, 72: 1653-1673.
100. Wilcox, T. 1999. Object Individuation: Infants use of shape, size, pattern, and color. Cognition, 72: 125-166.
101. Wilcox, T. 2003. Event-mapping tasks: Investigating the effects of prior information and event complexity on performance. Infant Behavior and Development, 26: 568-587.
102. Wilcox, T. 2007. Sex differences in infants' mapping of complex occlusion sequences: Further evidence. Infancy, 12: 1-25.
103. Wilcox, T., Alexander, A. M., Wheeler, L. and Norvell, J. M. in press. "Sex differences during visual scanning of occlusion events". In Developmental Psychology
104. Wilcox, T. and Baillargeon, R. 1998a. Object individuation in infancy: The use of featural information in reasoning about occlusion events. Cognitive Psychology, 37: 97-155.
105. Wilcox, T. and Baillargeon, R. 1998b. Object individuation in young infants: Further evidence with an event-monitoring task. Developmental Science, 1: 127-142.
106. Wilcox, T. and Chapa, C. 2002. Infants' reasoning about opaque and transparent occluders in an individuation task. Cognition, 85: B1-B10.
107. Wilcox, T. and Chapa, C. 2004. Priming infants to attend to color and pattern information in an individuation task. Cognition, 90: 265-302.
108. Wilcox, T. and Schweinle, A. 2002. Object individuation and event mapping: Developmental changes in infants' use of featural information. Developmental Science, 5: 87-105.
109. Wilcox, T. and Schweinle, A. 2003. Infants use of speed of motion to individuate objects in occlusion events. Infant Behavior and Development, 26: 253-282.
110. Wilcox, T., Woods, R., Tuggy, L. and Napoli, R. 2006. Shake, rattle, and one or two objects? Young infants' use of auditory information to individuate objects. Infancy, 9: 97-123.
111. Wilson, R. A. and Keil, F. C. 2000. "The shadows and shallows of explanation". In Explanation and cognition, Edited by: Keil, F. C. and Wilson, R. A. 87-114. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
112. Wu, D. March 2011. Young infants detect open-closed but not variable changes to objects in covering events, March, Montreal, Canada: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
113. Wu, D. and Baillargeon, R. March 2008. One or two humans? 10-month-olds' use of ontological and featural information to individuate objects, March, Vancouver, Canada: Paper presented at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies.
114. Wu, D., Li, X. and Baillargeon, R. 2012. Inferring the presence of a hidden object: Converging evidence for the 100-day milestone, Manuscript in preparation.
115. Wynn, K. 1992. Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature, 358: 749-750.
116. Xu, F. 2002. The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy. Cognition, 85: 223-250.
117. Xu, F. 2007. Sortal concepts, object individuation, and language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11: 400-406.
118. Xu, F. and Carey, S. 1996. Infants' metaphysics: The case of numerical identity. Cognitive Psychology, 30: 111-153.
119. Xu, F., Carey, S. and Quint, N. 2004. The emergence of kind-based object individuation in infancy. Cognitive Psychology, 49: 155-190.
120. Xu, F., Cote, M. and Baker, A. 2005. Labeling guides object individuation in 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 16: 372-377.
121. Xu, F. and Spelke, E. S. 2000. Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 74: B1-B11.
122. Yuan, S. and Fisher, C. 2009. "Really? She blicked the baby?": Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science, 20: 619-626.
123. Yonas, A. and Granrud, C. E. 1984. "The development of sensitivity to kinetic, binocular, and pictorial depth information in human infants". In Brain mechanisms and spatial vision, Edited by: Engle, D., Lee, D. and Jeannerod, M. 113-145. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.