ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, I discussed the ways in which infants perceive objects using object attributes such as shape, pattern, and color. In that discussion, I described considerable evidence that, while actively watching the world around them, infants learn general principles that they use to locate the boundaries of objects in complex visual scenes. These general principles are essentially those described by the Gestalt psychologists back in the 1950s (Wertheimer, 1939/1923). Using these principles, infants can find the boundaries between objects they have never seen before—indeed, the objects used as stimuli in the prior studies were used because infants had not seen them before. Clearly the ability to parse the world of objects in these ways is of special use to very young infants, because for them all objects are unfamiliar, at least to begin with.
