The Role of Shape in 4-month-old Infants’ Object Segregation

This research examined four-month-old infants’ use of featural information (shape or color and pattern) to segregate a display into two adjacent pieces. The infants were shown displays consisting of two objects that were the same or different in shape and that were decorated with either similar or different surface markings such that featural information could suggest that the two portions were either connected or not. Three displays were created that allowed the comparison of infants’ use of shape information and color and pattern information. The results suggest that, at four months of age, infants are more likely to use shape differences than color and pattern differences to find object boundaries. The results are discussed in the context of infants’ learning about the utility of different sources of information for predicting object boundary locations.