title: Representational momentum and children's sensori-motor representations of objects.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA.
authors.forename: Lynn K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Perry
authors.forename: Linda B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Stephen A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Hockema
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D011597:Psychomotor Performance