ABSTRACT
Imagine the world as seen through the eyes of a young infant. Their experience differs from that of an adult in numerous ways (e.g., the images young infants see are much less clearly focused), but perhaps the most consequential is that infants lack basic knowledge about what they see. This lack of knowledge has multiple consequences. Adults look around them and see collections of things they readily identify: a kitchen table with plates, glasses, and newspapers scattered haphazardly across the surface; a sidewalk with colored chalk, bottles of bubble liquid, and a jump rope left in the middle of play. These objects are meaningful to older children and adults, and we could identify each of these objects just by looking, we could explain in detail how each of these objects are used, and we could make guesses about who left these objects in these states of disarray. But the infant has none of this knowledge. Yet. She might be able to determine where one object ends and another begins, but possibly nothing else about these collections of objects. This chapter focuses on this most basic aspect of object perception: how infants determine the boundaries between objects.
