Cohesion as a principle for perceiving objecthood: Does it apply to animate agents?

Abstract. Previous research found that cohesion manipulations (e.g., splitting an object into two parts) may have deleterious effects on infants’ object representation. The present study investigated whether the cohesion principle is relevant only when assessing the continuity of inanimate objects, or whether it is equally fundamental for the perception and representation of animate agents. In two experiments, we assessed 8-month-old infants’ tracking behavior in events in which an agent (an animated snail) was either split in half, fused together, or simply changed its shape. Infants managed to individuate fused snails and snails that had changed their shape, but failed to track split snails, even in a perception-based paradigm. This suggests that the effects of cohesion manipulation apply to animate agents as well as inanimate objects. Moreover, these results suggest that infants’ inability to track split snails is not a consequence of a violation of core principles, but rather a consequence of the incr...