| dc.description.abstract | Infants' representation of objects is critical in learning about their environment and the way objects within the environment interact with each other. Two aspects of object processing that contribute to this understanding are interpretation of occlusion events and identifying event categories of three-dimensional objects. The use of eye-tracking technology allows us to analyze in detail the looking patterns of infants during these events and uncover more about the nature of infant representations of their physical environment. The current study examines the effect of forming categories - and assigning objects to a category - on object tracking. Using an eye-tracker, infants aged eleven to nineteen months were given experience observing the functions of rollers and cutters before examining an occlusion event in which one of the objects moved along a linear path, disappeared behind a screen, and emerged on the other side: either as the same object or a different object. We found two main effects: First, infants were more able to accurately track an occluded object after they experienced training trials. Second, infants also more accurately tracked the occluded object during the one-object event than the two-object event. | en |
