Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D Mareschal.
Over the past seven years, the main advances in our understanding of infant development have involved the application of cognitive neuroscience methods such as neuroimaging and computer modelling. Results obtained using these methods have illuminated further the complex interactions between nature and nurture that underlie early postnatal development.
Studies relying on looking-time measures have found evidence of a far more precocious understanding of hidden objects than Piaget originally described. However, there is now a heated controversy surrounding the results from looking-time studies - do they constitute any evidence of a conceptual or explicit understanding of objects? Moreover, even within the looking-time paradigm, young infants show rapid changes in their understanding of what constitutes a legitimate occlusion event, and in their ability to use feature information to individuate or keep track of the number of hidden objects. The picture that emerges from these studies is that young infants have a limited and sometimes fragmented understanding of hidden objects. We suggest that computational modelling could help provide a coherent account of the emergence of object-directed behaviours in infancy, although the fit between current models and existing data remains poor.