THE ROLE OF SHAPE IN 4-MONTH-OLD INFANTS’ OBJECT SEGREGATION Amy Needham Duke University This research examined four-month-old infants’ use of featural information (shape or color and pattern) to segregate a display into two adjacent pieces. The infants were shown displays consisting of two objects that were the same or different in shape and that were decorated with either similar or different surface markings such that featural information could suggest that the two portions were either connected or not. Three displays were created that allowed the comparison of infants’ use of shape information and color and pattern information. The results suggest that, at four months of age, infants are more likely to use shape differences than color and pattern differences to find object boundaries. The results are discussed in the context of infants’ learning about the utility of different sources of information for predicting object boundary locations. object perception perceptual development cognitive development object features When we look around us, we see many objects with ambiguous boundaries due to other ob- jects that are directly adjacent to them or that partly occlude them. Adults’ ability to seg- ment a crowded scene into reasonable and recognizable parts has been extensively stud- ied and has led to a number of interesting hypotheses for how the adult visual system accomplishes this task (Braunstein, Hoffman, & Saidpour, 1989; Burbeck & Pizer, 1995; Hoffman & Richards, 1984; Hoffman & Singh, 1997; Koenderink & van Doorn, 1982; Vaina & Zlateva, 1990). Most of these ap- proaches have explored the possibility that part boundaries (which are sometimes object boundaries, a term that will be used in the present paper to refer to places where two objects would separate if one were pulled), can be determined by a mathematical analyses of the shape of the object(s) in question. Research on how these perceptual abilities develop has been much less extensive than the ● Amy Needham, Department of Psychology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0086; e-mail: needham@psych. duke.edu. INFANT BEHAVIOR & DEVELOPMENT 22 (2), 1999, 161–178 ISSN 0163-6383 Copyright © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.