OBJECT SEGREGATION IN INFANCY

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The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the development of infants' ability to segment the visual world into objects. Researchers have identified three kinds of information that could be especially useful in parsing stationary, three-dimensional scenes into separate objects: configurational information (i.e., the shapes, colors, and patterns of objects), physical knowledge (e.g., the knowledge that objects cannot remain stable without support), and knowledge gained through previous experiences with objects (i.e., knowledge about specific objects and more general kinds of objects). The proposed experiments investigate infants' ability to use information from these sources with three sets of larger questions in mind. First, how do infants integrate information from different sources? What strategies do infants use that allow them to resolve conflicting perceptual cues and produce a unitary interpretation of a display? How can these integration strategies be described? The second larger question is how do these integration strategies change over time? Are there differences in younger and older infants' integration strategies? How can these different strategies be explained? And finally, the third question is can the observed changes in infants' integration abilities be linked to kinds of experiences they have with objects? These questions are addressed in 15 proposed experiments organized into four sections. The first three sections contain experiments that focus on (a) the role of one particular source of information, (b) how infants integrate information from this source with information from other sources, and (c) changes in integration that occur with development. The fourth section consists of experiments investigating the role of infants' experiences (both visual and manual) in the developmental changes in integration strategies. The proposed research should add to our understanding of how young infants experience the visual world, and could also lead to the identification of mechanisms controlling perceptual and cognitive development in infancy.