Principles of Object Perception

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early-developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive obiects by analyzing three-dlmensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccldentol geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perceptlan does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from one another, that tend to maintain their size ond shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that a general representation of obiect unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of famlllor kinds. The processes that construct this representotion may be related to processes of physical reasonlng.