A model of the development of the early infant object concept.

A computational model is proposed for the early stages of development of the object concept in infancy. Stages in development are represented as a sequence of grammars or rewrite rules that parse a set of perceptual phenomena. The infant's changes between developmental stages can be described by differences between the grammar rules that model each stage. The program replicates five studies by Bower et al on the development of the object concept and reaffirms the primacy of rest and motion parameters as explanatory invariants in early object-concept development.