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Phenomenal Permanence and the Development of Predictive Tracking in Infancy
Author(s) -
Bertenthal Bennett I.,
Longo Matthew R.,
Kenny Sarah
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01002.x
Subject(s) - object permanence , psychology , tracking (education) , embodied cognition , cognitive psychology , occlusion , ball (mathematics) , object (grammar) , artificial intelligence , developmental psychology , computer vision , cognitive development , cognition , computer science , mathematics , neuroscience , geometry , medicine , surgery , pedagogy
The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five‐, 7‐, and 9‐month‐old infants were shown a ball rolling across a visual scene and briefly disappearing via kinetic occlusion, instantaneous disappearance, implosion, or virtual occlusion. Three different measures converged to show that predictive tracking increased with age and that infants were most likely to anticipate the reappearance of the ball following kinetic occlusion. These results suggest that infants' knowledge of the permanence and nonpermanence of objects is embodied in their predictive tracking.