Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account

By R. Baillargeon, Maayan Stavans, Di Wu, Y. Gertner, Peipei Setoh, Audrey K. Kittredge, Amélie Bernard. 2012

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Much of the research on object individuation in infancy has used a task in which two different objects emerge in alternation from behind a large screen, which is then removed to reveal either one or two objects. In their seminal work, Xu and Carey (1996) found that it is typically not until the end of the first year that infants detect a violation when a single object is revealed. Since then, a large number of investigations have modified the standard task in various ways and found that young infants succeed with some but not with other modifications, yielding a complex and unwieldy picture. In this article, we argue that this confusing picture can be better understood by bringing to bear insights from a related subfield of infancy research, physical reasoning. By considering how infants reason about object information within and across physical events, we can make sense of apparently inconsistent findings from different object-individuation tasks. In turn, object-individuation findings deepen our understanding of how physical reasoning develops in infancy. Integrating the insights from physical-reasoning and object-individuation investigations thus enriches both subfields and brings about a clearer account of how infants represent objects and events.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

The limits and potentials of deep learning for robotics (2018, background): “Humans, on the other hand, operate under intuitive rather than exact physical models [6], [7], [10], [45], [74], [88].”
Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory: Critical Review (2019, unknown): “Physical reasoning is an innate ability that assists infants to think about physical objects and interact with them ( Baillargeon et al., 2012).”
Mind Games: Game Engines as an Architecture for Intuitive Physics. (2017, background): “Such a body-representation proposal is in line with the ‘structural layer’ proposal [38].”