Towards a What-and-Where Model of Infants’ Object Representations

We propose that the capacity for infants to form mental representations of hidden or occluded objects can be decomposed into two tasks: one process that identifies salient objects, and a second complementary process that identifies salient locations. This approach is inspired by the distinction between dorsal and ventral extrastriate visual processing in the primate visual system. We illustrate our approach by describing an eye-movement model that incorporates both dorsal and ventral processing streams, and by using the model to simulate infants’ reactions to possible and impossible events from an infant looking-time study (Baillargeon, 1986). As expected, we find that the dorsal system is sensitive to the location of a key feature in these events (i.e., the location of an obstacle), while the ventral system responds equivalently to the possible and impossible events. We conclude by discussing how these results may help explain infants’ reactions in looking-time studies.