A model of physical reasoning in infancy

Abstract

ABsrRAcr How do infants learn about the physical world? Current research on the development of infants ' reasoning about various types of physical phenomena (e.g., support and collision phenomena) points to two developmental pat-terns that recur across ages and phenomena. The first pat-tern is that, when learning about a new physical phenome-non, infants first form a preliminary, all-or-none concept that captures the essence of the phenomenon but few of its details. With further experience, this initial concept is pro-gressively elaborated. Infants slowly identify discrete and continuous variables that are relevant to the initial concept, study their effects, and incorporate this accrued knowledge into their reasoning, resulting in increasingly accurate pre-dictions over time. The second developmental pattern is that, after identifying a continuous variable as being relevant to

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