Eye tracking provides no evidence that young infants understand path obstruction

Bremner, J.G. and Slater, A. and Mason, U. and Spring, J. and Rees, A. and Tham, D.S.Y. and Johnson, S.P. (2021) Eye tracking provides no evidence that young infants understand path obstruction. Infant Behavior and Development, 65: 101659. ISSN 0163-6383

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Abstract

In two experiments with 47 4-month-olds, we investigated attention to key aspects of events in which an object moved along a partly occluded path that contained an obstruction. Infants were familiarized with a ball rolling behind an occluder to be revealed resting on an end wall, and on test trials an obstruction wall was placed in the ball's path. In Experiment 1, we did not find longer looking when the object appeared in an impossible location beyond the obstruction, and infants did not selectively fixate the object in this location. In Experiment 2, after rolling one or two balls, we measured infants' fixations of a two-object outcome with one ball in a novel but possible resting position and the other in a familiar but impossible location beyond the obstruction. Infants looked longer at the ball in the possible but novel location, likely reflecting a looking preference for location novelty. Thus we obtained no evidence that infants reasoned about obstruction and identified a violation on that basis.