Cognition , in press Running head : LEARNING ABOUT OCCLUSION

We examined 6-month-olds abilities to represent occluded objects, using a cornealreflection eye-tracking technique. Experiment 1 compared infants’ ability to extrapolate the current pre-occlusion trajectory with their ability to base predictions on resent experiences of novel object motions. In the first condition infants performed at asymptote (≈2/3 accurate predictions) from the first occlusion passage. In the second condition all infants initially failed to make accurate prediction. Performance, however, reached asymptote after two occlusion passages. This is the first study that demonstrates such rapid learning effects during an occlusion task. Experiment 2 replicates these effects and demonstrates a robust memory effect extending 24 hours. In occlusion tasks such long-term memory effects have previously only been observed in 14-month-olds (Moore & Meltzoff, 2004).