Abstract
This paper is an output of the project ‘Rethinking Mind and Meaning: A case study from a co-disciplinary approach’ (Award Nr.: AH/ L015234/1), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as part of the Science in Culture Theme (http://www.sciculture.ac.uk).
Highlights
One of the most basic components of the ‘folk physics’ of adult humans is the ability to represent the environment around them as filled with discrete objects – trees and trucks, coffee cups, and grains of sand
We have found no dissociation between the ability to individuate objects using property/kind information and the ability to individuate objects by spatio-temporal information in capuchin monkeys
A final question is whether our results bear on representations of object ‘kinds’ at all: it could be argued that capuchin monkeys in the current study showed only the ability to use featural information in object individuation
Summary
One of the most basic components of the ‘folk physics’ of adult humans is the ability to represent the environment around them as filled with discrete objects – trees and trucks, coffee cups, and grains of sand We think of these objects as belonging to kinds (as being trees or coffee cups or grains of sand), as having different properties (as being red or blue, round or square), and as occupying different places and tracing different, typically continuous, paths through space and time. All of these ways of thinking about objects inform our expectations about what we will find in our environment and is the basis for more complex understandings and manipulations of the physical structure of the world. Xu and Carey (1996) suggest that the change in infants’ performance between the ages of 10 and 12 months can be seen as strong evidence for a fundamental change in the way infants conceive of objects, namely that 12-month-olds possess sortal concepts that 10-month-olds do not: whereas 12-month-olds possess a variety of sortals like “ball” and “duck” (and are capable of representing that a ball is not a duck), 10-month-olds would possess only a single sortal – roughly glossed as “bounded physical object” - which is not sufficient to individuate the two objects in the task
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