Premium
Infant perception of a manual pick‐up event
Author(s) -
Leslie Alan M.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1984.tb00531.x
Subject(s) - psychology , perception , habituation , object (grammar) , cognitive psychology , context (archaeology) , object permanence , event (particle physics) , communication , developmental psychology , cognition , cognitive development , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , computer science , paleontology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
Manual pick‐up of an object is a simple causal event frequently observed by infants. A habituation‐recovery of looking technique with filmed stimuli is used in experiments which seek to investigate aspects of the perception and encoding of such events in infants. In the first study with 28‐week‐olds, it is found that ‘lateral mirror‐image’ pick‐ups are hardly discriminable, while a change in the contact relation of hand and object is readily discriminable. In the second, again with 28‐week‐olds, the discriminability of the contact relation appears to be specific to a dynamic context involving a hand (rather than another inanimate object). The results of a further experiment make it appear unlikely that the previous results were simply due to the partial occlusion of the picked‐up object produced by the grasping. The implications of these results for infant perception of causality are briefly considered.