ABSTRACT
One of the most notable contributions of the infant research literature over the past decade has been its revolutionary impact on our thinking about perceptual and cognitive development (J. M. Mandler, 1990). No longer can we assume that basic concepts about number, people, causality, and so forth must await the development of concrete operational thinking (Piaget, 1970), or, for that matter, even preoperational thinking. Much of the recent research points to the conclusion that the infant comes into the world with a set of fundamental constraints on, or processing heuristics relating to, how information can be organized or extracted (Keil, 1981; Rozin, 1976).
