Infants' Individuation and Enumeration of Actions

Two experiments examined 6-month-old infants' ability to individuate and enumerate physical actions—the sequential jumps of a puppet In both experiments, which employed a habituation paradigm, infants successfully discriminated two-jump from three-jump sequences The sequences of activity in the two experiments provided for an initial exploration of the cues infants use to individuate actions Results show that (a) infants can individuate and enumerate actions in a sequence, indicating that their enumeration mechanism is quite general in the kinds of entities over which it will operate, (b) actions whose temporal boundaries are characterized by a contrast between motion and absence of motion are especially easy to individuate and enumerate, but nonetheless (c) infants can individuate and enumerate actions embedded in a sequence of continuous motion, indicating that infants possess procedures for parsing an ongoing motionful scene into distinct portions of activity

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