ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on cognitive development with young children. In particular they focus on how objects are represented mentally and verbally. The main focus of the study was children’s relative performances with objects, parts, and holes. Overall, children’s performance with objects and holes was roughly identical (77 percent and 74 percent), but they did less well with parts (48 percent). The first experiment found that children were equally good at tasks involving objects and holes, but worse at tasks involving parts. The second experiment, in which the name of the part was changed from “handle” to “foot,” found equal levels of performance with objects, holes, and parts. At the very least, the study shows that the strongest version of the object-bias claim—that young children can cope only with whole objects—is mistaken. More tentatively, the results are consistent with the theory that objects have no special status in children’s individuation.
