Principles of Object Perception

TLDR

Research on human infants has begun to illuminate early processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects, possibly linked to physical reasoning. Infants perceive objects by grouping perceptual arrays into motionally coherent units that maintain size and shape, act only on contact, and are not driven by figural goodness or nonaccidental geometry, indicating a general representation of object unity and boundaries.

Abstract

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early‐developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive objects by analyzing three‐dimensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccidental geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perception does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from one another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that o general representation of object unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of familiar kinds. The processes that construct this representation may be related to processes of physical reasoning.