Comparing infants' use of featural and spatiotemporal information when individuating objects in an event monitoring design

Object individuation refers to the task of being able to decide how many distinct objects there are involved in a given scenario. Recently, by means of the so-called violation-of-expectation method several experimental studies have revealed that infants are capable of object individuation. However, to what extent infants rely on spatiotemporal or featural object information when individuating objects is currently under debate. Hitherto, infants' use of spatiotemporal and featural object information has only been compared directly using the rather cognitively demanding event mapping design. The results obtained using this design reveal that infants are more successful using spatiotemporal object information than when using featural information. However, recent studies using the less cognitively demanding event monitoring design have revealed that even younger infants are capable of object individuation using featural information. Thus, it remains a question whether spatiotemporal object information generally has primacy compared to featural information when individuating objects, or whether this primacy is only manifest under cognitively demanding conditions. This question is adressed in the present series of experiments in which infants' use of spatiotemporal and featural information is compared directly using the less demanding event monitoring design. The results are discussed in relation to existing empirical evidence.