Catastrophic individuation failures in infancy: A new model and predictions.

Abstract

Comparison of infant findings from the physical-reasoning and object-individuation literatures reveals a contradictory picture. On the one hand, physical-reasoning results indicate that young infants can use featural information to guide their actions on objects and to detect interaction violations (when objects interact in ways that are not physically possible) as well as change violations (when objects spontaneously undergo featural changes that are not physically possible). On the other hand, object-individuation results indicate that young infants typically cannot use featural information to detect individuation violations (when the number of objects revealed at the end of an event is less than the number of objects introduced during the event). In this article, we attempt to reconcile these two bodies of research. In a new model of early individuation, we propose that two systems help infants individuate objects in physical events: the object-file and physical-reasoning systems. Under certain conditions, disagreements between the systems result in catastrophic individuation failures, leading infants to hold no expectation at all about how many objects are present. We report experiments with 9- to 11-month-old infants (N = 216) that tested predictions from the model. After two objects emerged in alternation from behind a screen, infants detected no violation when the screen was lowered to reveal no object. Similarly, after two objects emerged in alternation from inside a box, which was then shaken, infants detected no violation when the box remained silent, as though empty. We end with new directions, suggested by our model, for research on early object representations.

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

“…These patterns suggest that children naturally analyze their experiences into conceptual predicates and arguments, and detect the abstract similarity between the agents and patients of diverse events (e.g., breaking, giving, eating). Second, infant cognition research suggests that infants create structured mental representations of events; in these representations, objects are individuated and linked with distinct roles such as the hitter and hittee in a collision event, the container and content in a containment event, and so on (e.g., Stavans, Lin, Wu, & Baillargeon, ; Yin & Csibra, ). These patterns suggest that young infants' representations of events have predicate–argument structure: They include knowledge‐rich role categories that depend on the relationships between objects rather than on the identity of the objects themselves.…”

Why Not Just Features? Reconsidering Infants’ Behavior in Individuation Tasks

“…According to the object-first hypothesis, it seems to be demanding for children to handle the interplay of spatiotemporal information processing and featural object-identification (e.g., Leslie et al, 1998;Wilcox and Baillargeon, 1998;Krøjgaard, 2000;Bonatti et al, 2002;Wilcox and Chapa, 2002;Rivera and Zawaydeh, 2007;Futó et al, 2010;Surian and Caldi, 2010). Stavans et al (2019) attempted to reconcile these findings with research on infants' abilities of physical reasoning. The latter suggests that infants are able to use featural information to guide their understanding of physical events much earlier than for object individuation.…”

“…There are different objectfile accounts: either object-representation information is stored in an object's file, and spatiotemporal information is used to pick out this file (Kahneman et al, 1992;Gordon and Irwin, 1996), or an index is seen as fixed to an object and remaining there as it moves and object-representation information can be fixed to the index (Pylyshyn, 1989(Pylyshyn, , 2009Leslie et al, 1998). Stavans et al (2019), however, interpreted both processes as separate but closely related mechanisms within the OF-System. Overall, object files were invoked to explain the ability to represent objects and their features.…”

“…Based on the corpus of relevant studies, Stavans et al (2019) concluded that infants at 12 months of age and younger do not always recognize individuation violations, that is, they do not expect the correct number of objects presented at the end of an occlusion event. Individuation becomes especially difficult for infants when two different objects from the same basiclevel category are used, e.g., two balls that differ in size, pattern, and color.…”

The developmental origins of syntactic bootstrapping

“…These patterns suggest that children naturally analyze their experiences into conceptual predicates and arguments, and detect the abstract similarity between the agents and patients of diverse events (e.g., breaking, giving, eating). Second, infant cognition research suggests that infants create structured mental representations of events; in these representations, objects are individuated and linked with distinct roles such as the hitter and hittee in a collision event, the container and content in a containment event, and so on (e.g., Stavans, Lin, Wu, & Baillargeon, 2019;Yin & Csibra, 2015). These patterns suggest that young infants' representations of events have predicate-argument structure: They include knowledge-rich role categories that depend on the relationships between objects rather than on the identity of the objects themselves.…”