Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

What do two-year-olds understand about hidden-object events?

Clay Mash1, Elizabeth Novak, Neil E Berthier

  • 1Section on Child and Family Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. mashc@mail.nih.gov

Developmental Psychology
|March 30, 2006
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Getting the proper grip: A longitudinal study of how infants learn to adapt action Plans.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same author

Development of the Visual Analysis of Form and Contour.

Children (Basel, Switzerland)·2025
Same author

The role of cGAS in epithelial dysregulation in inflammatory bowel disease and gastrointestinal malignancies.

Frontiers in pharmacology·2024
Same author

Principles and practices of returning individual research results to participants in large studies of pregnancy and childhood.

American journal of epidemiology·2024
Same author

Visual stimulus structure, visual system neural activity, and visual behavior in young human infants.

PloS one·2024
Same author

How the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcome (ECHO) cohort can spur discoveries in environmental epidemiology.

American journal of epidemiology·2024
Same journal

Dimensionalities of home science environment and family science capital and their relationship to science achievement: Evidence from a large-scale study in Chinese adolescents.

Developmental psychology·2026
Same journal

The frequency of childhood gender-nonconforming behavior in a nationally representative sample.

Developmental psychology·2026
Same journal

Linking childhood adversity and daily hassles to adolescent sleep behaviors: Diurnal cortisol as a mediating pathway.

Developmental psychology·2026
Same journal

Infants' expectations about caregivers' comforting behavior and associations with maternal depressive symptoms at 6, 9, and 12 months.

Developmental psychology·2026
Same journal

Nonsymbolic ratio and fraction magnitude processing predict fraction knowledge in early grades.

Developmental psychology·2026
Same journal

The growing influence of the parental monitoring-peer affiliation pathway in early adolescence.

Developmental psychology·2026
See all related articles

Toddlers understand object properties like solidity and can predict object location, even when visual novelty is controlled. This research clarifies developmental psychology findings on early object cognition.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Infant Perception

Background:

  • Infants may possess object knowledge (e.g., solidity) by 2 months, yet toddlers' manual search tasks show limited evidence of this understanding.
  • Previous attempts to reconcile these findings with preferential-looking studies were confounded by visual novelty of test outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To reconcile disparities between preferential-looking and manual search studies on toddlers' object property understanding.
  • To investigate toddlers' predictions of object location, controlling for visual novelty.
  • To examine if preferential-looking performance differs from manual search due to response time allowances.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized preferential-looking as the dependent measure with events and apparatus from manual search tasks.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Controlled for visual novelty in test outcomes.
  • Conducted two experiments, including one comparing preferential-looking and manual search performance.

    • Main Results:

    • Toddlers looked longer when an agent opened the correct door and found no ball compared to an incorrect door revealing no ball.
    • Preferential-looking performance did not differ from manual search tasks due to additional response time.
    • Findings suggest toddlers can predict object location, not just postdict.

    Conclusions:

    • Toddlers demonstrate an understanding of object properties and predict object location, challenging previous manual search findings.
    • Methodological improvements, particularly controlling for visual novelty, are crucial for accurately assessing infant and toddler cognition.
    • This study reconciles conflicting data on early object understanding, highlighting toddlers' predictive abilities.