Department of psychology, Uppsala University

At the Baby lab at Department of Psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden Claes von Hofsten and his fellow researches use Tobii Eye Trackers to measure development of infant object representation.

5 month old infants can represent temporarily occluded objects.

The ability to remember (represent) temporarily occluded objects is an important milestone in early infancy. This ability helps the child relate to other things than what is directly perceivable. In addition, infants enhanced object representations help them increase their ability to relate to the external world, predict future events and successfully interact with the environment. In the Uppsala Baby lab eye tracking is used to investigate how this ability develops during the infants first year of life.

7 month old infants assume that occluded objects will continue.

Participating infants are usually presented with different movies in which a ball rolls towards, and disappear behind, a screen. After a certain interval the ball reappear on the other side of the screen. As infants watch these events a Tobii Eye Tracker is used to measure where they look.
 
The question asked is when infants move their eyes from the location where the ball disappears to the location where the ball reappears. If the infants move their eyes to the reappearing location before the ball emerges this is interpreted as an indication that infants expect the ball to emerge at this location and that infants have the ability to represent the ball behind the screen.
 
Using this method the researchers have been able to demonstrate that infants can represent temporarily occluded objects from 4 months of age. In addition, they have been able to demonstrate that 6 month old infants can represent occluded objects for up to 4 seconds. At this age infants also possess the ability to learn novel events after only a few presentations and remember these events for at least 24 hours.

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