Study title

Nativists claim that young infants understand object permanence and rules governing object movement. However, a fundamental problem is that almost all the evidence arises from a simple measure of how long infants look at specific events, longer looking being taken as indication that infants' expectations regarding object permanence etc have been violated. In contrast, there is a growing literature indicating perceptual constraints on young infants' ability to perceive an object's trajectory as it passes behind a screen: young infants only succeed when the perceptual 'gap' is small. This supports an empiricist account through which infants gradually developing awareness of perceptual events indicating continued existence. In our lab we are now able to gather eye-track data while infants inspect 3D events. In order to provide a stronger test of nativist claims, we will harness this technique in two research strands. The first will replicate key eye-tracking studies of trajectory perception using 3D rather than 2D displays. The second will replicate a range of key tasks previously used to support the nativist account, supplementing looking time measures with eye-tracking data, selecting tasks for which the nativist and alternative accounts make clear and opposed predictions regarding patterns of fixation and predictive scanning.