Object individuation in 10‐month‐old infants: Manipulating the amount of introduction

The role of habituation/introduction as a possible confounder in the so‐called violation‐of‐expectation method has been discussed recently among infancy researchers. This study reports two experiments on object individuation in 10‐month‐old infants using the occlusion design employed by Xu and Carey (1996, Experiment 2). The first experiment replicated the procedure used by Xu and Carey (1996). In the second experiment the amount of introduction was reduced considerably. The first experiment replicated the original findings of Xu and Carey (1996): infants having unequivocal access to spatiotemporal information succeeded in object individuation, whereas those provided with feature/kind information did not. In the second experiment, however, infants failed in object individuation in both conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to the relevant literature.