Object recognition and object segregation in 4.5-month-old infants

Six experiments investigated how 4.5-month-old infants' perception of a display is affected by an immediate prior experience with an object similar to part of the test display. Prior research (A. Needham & R. Baillargeon, 1998) showed that when infants see an object alone and then see it next to a novel object, this prior experience allows them to determine the location of a boundary between the two objects. The present experiments investigated whether infants would also use an object similar, but not identical, to a test object in the same kind of task. The results indicate that infants' use of a prior experience is disrupted by changes in the features of the object, but not by a change in its spatial orientation. These findings suggest that, like adults, infants may expect that changes in the features of an object are associated with a change in the identity of the object, but do not have the same expectation for changes in spatial orientation.