“Out Of Sight – Out Of Mind?”

Individuating objects is an essential cognitive ability when making decisions about the number and the identity of objects. Research demonstrates this capacity in infancy and shows that infants employ various sources of information in this process. The present book explores whether domain-specific motion accounts as one such source. Four experiments investigated 10- and 12-month-olds’ ability to recall how many objects were involved in an event on the basis of domain-specific motion cues. Using an adapted version of the Xu and Carey paradigm (Xu & Carey, 1996), infants saw an animate and an inanimate object repeatedly appear 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, generate 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. It remains to be tested whether it is a question of inability or whether motion information interferes with this task.