Some surprising limits on infants’ persisting object representations

Erik Cheries
Department of Psychology
Yale University

Recent work with adult subjects has revealed several implicit principles 
that govern our ability to keep track of objects over time. In my talk 
I'll demonstrate that these constraints operate even more powerfully 
early on in development - extremely subtle manipulations (e.g., simply 
splitting an object in half) interfere with infants’ ability to maintain 
persisting object representations.  These results argue that infants’ 
ability to maintain persisting object representations is similarly 
constrained by both the rules dictating how an object ought to behave, 
and the capacity limitations of object-based attention. I'll discuss how 
this work relates to the “Core Knowledge” framework that predicts 
continuity over development.