A review of object individuation in infancy

The present review of object individuation in infancy is divided into five sections. The first section is a brief history of the field and an outline of the development of efficient methods for studying object individuation among infants. Sections 2 and 3 are structured around the empirical evidence obtained by using two different kinds of basic and widely used experiments: infants' responses to (apparently) disappearing objects (Section 2), and infants' responses to objects that (apparently) change into other objects (Section 3). In the fourth section, theories of object individuation are presented and discussed. The final section takes a look ahead to the future and proposes a few experiments that may help in resolving some of the most important disputes regarding object individuation in infancy.