No abstract

Concepts of objects as enduring and complete across space and time have been documented in infants within several months after birth, but little is known about how such concepts arise during development. Current theories that stress innate knowledge may neglect the potential contributions of experience to guide acquisition of object concepts. To examine whether learning plays an important role in early development of object representations, we used an eye-tracking paradigm with 4-and 6-month-old infants who were provided with an initial period of experience viewing an unoccluded trajectory, or no experience with this particular stimulus. After exposure to the unoccluded trajectory for only 2 min, there was a reliable increase in 4-month-old infants' anticipatory eye movement when the infants subsequently viewed occludedtrajectory displays, relative to 4-month-old infants who did not receive this experience. This effect of training in 4-month-old infants was found to generalize to another category of trajectory orientation. Older infants received no additional benefit from training, most likely because they enter the task capable of forming robust object representations under these conditions. This finding provides compelling evidence that very brief training facilitated formation of object representations, and suggests more generally that infants learn such representations from real-world experience viewing objects undergoing occlusion and disocclusion.

The experiments reported here investigated the development of a fundamental component of cognition: to recognize and generalize abstract relations. Infants were presented with simple rulegoverned patterned sequences of visual shapes (ABB, AAB, and ABA) that could be discriminated from differences in the position of the repeated element (late, early, or nonadjacent, respectively). Eight-month-olds were found to distinguish patterns on the basis of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to its position in the sequence; 11-month-olds distinguished patterns over the position of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to the nonadjacent repetition. These results suggest that abstract pattern detection may develop incrementally in a process of constructing complex relations from more primitive components.Detection and generalization of patterns is a fundamental, core component of cognition, central to object and face recognition (Biederman, 1987;Hummel & Biederman, 1992), categorization (Kruschke, 1992), inference (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), reasoning (Murphy, 2002), word segmentation (Swingley, 2005), language acquisition (Brown, 1973;Pinker, 1994), and other developmental achievements. A central question often posed by developmental researchers, therefore, concerns the ability of infants and children to learn patterns and structure. The environment contains an immeasurable variety of objects and events, and an infinite number of relations between them, most of which are not useful for the developing child. It is essential, then, to understand the types of patterns that children are and are not able to learn.Correspondence should be addressed to Scott P. Johnson, UCLA Psychology-Developmental, Box 951563, 1285 Franz Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563. E-mail: scott.johnson@ucla.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptInfancy. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 March 11. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptOne common approach in investigations of early pattern perception is to examine infants' sensitivity to structured relations among stimulus features in visual or auditory input. Experiments on statistical learning, for example, have explored the extent to which infants detect and use distributional information in auditory or visual sequences to combine individual features into larger units. Typically in these experiments, infants are presented with a stream of input consisting of repeating multielement units with randomized order, but fixed internal structure. Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) used this approach to investigate 8-month-old infants' word segmentation in a corpus of artificial speech. Noting that adjacent sounds in natural speech that are likely to cooccur are usually found within words, whereas low-probability sound pairs tend to span word boundaries, Saffran et al. asked whether this difference in probability of cooccurrence provides potential information for word boundaries. Infants' discrimination of high-and low-probability sound pairs was e...

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity perception in infants. The goal of this investigation was to examine the inputs to this process. We recorded eye movements in 3‐month‐old infants as they participated in a standard object unity task and found systematic differences in scanning patterns between those infants whose post‐habituation preferences were indicative of unity perception versus those infants who did not perceive unity. Perceivers, relative to nonperceivers, scanned more reliably in the vicinity of the visible rod parts and scanned more frequently across the range of rod motion. These results suggest that emerging object concepts are tied closely to available visual information in the environment, and the process of information pickup.