Development of object concepts in infancy: Evidence for early learning in an eye-tracking paradigm

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 occluded-trajectory 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.

[1]  J. Piaget.  The origins of intelligence in children, New York (W W Norton) 1963. , 1963 .

[2]  P. Wolff.  The causes, controls, and organization of behavior in the neonate. , 1966, Psychological issues.

[3]  P. L. Adams.  THE ORIGINS OF INTELLIGENCE IN CHILDREN , 1976 .

[4]  Marshall M. Haith,et al.  Rules That Babies Look By: The Organization of Newborn Visual Activity , 1980 .

[5]  C. Rovee-Collier,et al.  Advances in infancy research , 1981 .

[6]  D. F. Fisher,et al.  Eye movements : cognition and visual perception , 1982 .

[7]  M. Bornstein,et al.  Development in Infancy , 1982 .

[8]  E. L. Keller,et al.  Smooth-pursuit initiation in the presence of a textured background in monkey , 1986, Vision Research.

[9]  Alan Slater,et al.  Newborn and older infants' perception of partly occluded objects☆ , 1990 .

[10]  Karen Wynn,et al.  Addition and subtraction by human infants , 1992, Nature.

[11]  E. Spelke,et al.  Origins of knowledge. , 1992, Psychological review.

[12]  B. Fischer,et al.  Express saccades and visual attention , 1993, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[13]  G. Butterworth,et al.  Michotte's experimental phenomenology of perception , 1994 .

[14]  G. Bronson.  Infant's transitions toward adult-like scanning. , 1994, Child development.

[15]  David J. Field,et al.  What Is the Goal of Sensory Coding? , 1994, Neural Computation.

[16]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Perception of object unity in 2-month-old infants. , 1995 .

[17]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[18]  David J. Field,et al.  Emergence of simple-cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for natural images , 1996, Nature.

[19]  C. Hofsten,et al.  Development of smooth pursuit tracking in young infants , 1997, Vision Research.

[20]  J. Richards.  Cognitive neuroscience of attention : a developmental perspective , 1998 .

[21]  J. Richards,et al.  Infant attention and the development of smooth pursuit tracking. , 1999, Developmental psychology.

[22]  R. Baillargeon,et al.  2.5-Month-Old Infants' Reasoning about When Objects Should and Should Not Be Occluded , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[23]  M. Posner,et al.  Development of the functional visual field. , 2001, Acta psychologica.

[24]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Visual statistical learning in infancy: evidence for a domain general learning mechanism , 2002, Cognition.

[25]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Infants' perception of object trajectories. , 2003, Child development.

[26]  I. Howard,et al.  Visual pursuit over textured backgrounds in different depth planes , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.