Object Locations,Identity and Absent Reference Understanding at 12 Months

Spatial and contextual information plays an organizing role in many cognitive processes including object individuation and memory retrieval. Recently, attention has been drawn to the fact that changes in an object's location negatively affect infants' learning in different domains. One example is that prestudy exposure to a target object in a nontest location disrupts infants' ability to locate that object when it is hidden in a test room. In the current study, we investigate the possibility that infants' difficulty finding the object is the result of confusion about the identity of the target object. In the current research, infants were familiarized with an object in one room and tested in the other. Infants who were shown a characteristic identifying feature on the object in both locations and who were thus able to track the object identity could later locate the absent referent. In contrast, when infants' attention was drawn to different features on the object in the two locations or to the object itself via pointing, infants were unable to find the object.