Visual Access and Attention in Two‐Year‐Olds' Event Reasoning and Object Search

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Abstract
Several recent studies have revealed substantial limitations in 2‐year‐olds' ability to search accurately for objects that have undergone unseen movement, even along highly constrained paths. In many of these studies, children observed a ball as it rolled down a track and behind an occluding panel that contained 4 doors. The track had a barrier that was partly visible and could be placed in locations corresponding to the doors. When the ball came to a rest against the barrier and behind the occluder, the child's task was to find the ball by opening the correct door. The search accuracy of 2‐year‐olds has not differed from chance across several variations of this task. This research was conducted to identify the source of 2‐year‐olds' limitation in this domain. Children were granted a full view of the event before the ball was occluded with a door panel. Children's performance was better under this condition, but was still not systematically accurate unless their gaze remained locked onto the correct location. Two‐year‐olds' weak performance in these search tasks appears to be more a consequence of limitations in spatial integration than in their representation of unseen movement.