Limits to Infants' Knowledge of Objects: The Case of Magical Appearance

1 November 1998

journal article
Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Science

Vol. 9 (6) , 448-455
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00084

Abstract

Young infants have an impressive knowledge of material objects. They appreciate that distinct objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, are internally cohesive units that maintain their boundaries, and exist continuously in space and time. We report a surprising limit to this body of understanding: Although 8-month-olds responded to the “magical” disappearance of an object as an unexpected event, they did not so respond to a magical appearance. These results suggest that infants' understanding of objects differs from adult cognition in important respects. We discuss four possible ways in which this finding can be reconciled with evidence that infants appreciate the spatiotemporal continuity of objects.

Keywords

This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:

Numerical Transformations in Five-month-old Human Infants
Mathematical Cognition, 1997
Infants’ Metaphysics: The Case of Numerical Identity
Cognitive Psychology, 1996
Infants Possess a System of Numerical Knowledge
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1995
Domain-specific knowledge and conceptual change
Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1994
Physical reasoning in young infants: Seeking explanations for impossible events
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1994
Visual attention and objects: Evidence for hierarchical coding of location.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1993
The reviewing of object files: Object-specific integration of information
Cognitive Psychology, 1992
Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants.
Developmental Psychology, 1987
Representing the existence and the location of hidden objects: Object permanence in 6- and 8-month-old infants
Cognition, 1986
Object permanence in five-month-old infants
Cognition, 1985