Infants' tracking of objects and collections

Memory load affects object individuation in 18-month-old infants

“…This time, on Switch trials we always switched one of the hidden objects with a nonsolid substance. The objectto-substance switch in Experiment 2 was predicted to be more salient than the object-to-object switch in Experiment 1 because the substance was expected to be less familiar to infants than the Switch objects used in Experiment 1, because the substance was unlikely to have a known label, because the substance was less featurally complex than the objects we used, and because previous research has shown that infants (Cheries, Mitroff, Wynn, & Scholl, 2008;Chiang & Wynn, 2000;Rosenberg & Carey, 2012) and adults (vanMarle & Scholl, 2003) often treat nonsolid substances differently than objects due to the failure of substances to maintain rigid boundaries. If infants presented with three-object arrays successfully use the switch between an object and a nonsolid substance to individuate, this would suggest that infants are able to store some featural information about items in three-object arrays (i.e., enough to detect a change from an object to a substance) but that this information is relatively sparse (i.e., too sparse to support detection of a change from an object to another object as in Experiment 1).…”

Large-Number Addition and Subtraction by 9-Month-Old Infants

“…This scalar variability is a hallmark of the accumulator model. Chiang and Wynn (2000) also looked at infants' representations of large numbers of objects, finding that infants could successfully reason about the ''magical disappearance'' of a large number (specifically, a collection) of objects provided the objects' contours and individual identities were made initially salient.…”

Continuous versus discrete quantity in infant multiple object tracking

“…Continuous and discrete quantity representations are not mutually exclusive and infants may use both, with the most appropriate information driving their behavior. For example, infants interested in maximizing amount of food would select one large cracker rather than two smaller crackers, even though the numerical outcome is smaller (Feigenson, Carey and Hauser, 2002), while infants may resort to something like counting if the number of individuals to be attended to exceeds parallel individuation (Xu and Spelke, 2000;Chiang and Wynn, 2000). Further work must be done to clarify how infants track small sets by discrete numerosity, when that provides the critical information.…”