Accommodation of visual tracking patterns in human infants to object movement patterns

Infants (80, ages 3-9 months) watched a model train which repeatedly travelled around a track and in and out of a tunnel. Movements by Ss and by the train were videotaped. Ss looked near the entrance end of the tunnel just before the train's reappearance on initial trials. Across subsequent trials Ss progressively looked closer to the tunnel exit before the train's reappearance, made more visual anticipations of reappearances, and required shorter delays in spotting the train after reappearances. These short-term changes in visual behavior parallel changes observed across age by Piaget and fit well his assumption that the infant's increasingly sophisticated action patterns evolve by successive accommodations to encountered phenomena. Significant effects on response change were found for Criterion levels but not for variables of Age, Sex, or Time-Delay in the tunnel.