Representational momentum and children's sensori-motor representations of objects

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping at a barrier visible above the occluder. Three-year-olds were able to take into account the barrier when searching for the object, while 2-year-olds were not. However, both groups judged faster moving objects to travel farther as indicated by their incorrect reaches. Thus, the results show that young children's sensori-motor representations exhibit a form of representational momentum. This unifies the perceptually based representations of early childhood with adults' dynamic representations that incorporate physical regularities but that are also available to conscious reasoning.