How Manual Object Exploration is Associated with 7- to 8-Month-Old Infants’ Visual Predic- tion Abilities in Spatial Object Processing Claudia Kubicek, Bianca Jovanovic, and Gudrun Schwarzer Developmental Psychology Justus-Liebig-University Giessen The present experiment examined whether infants’ visual prediction performance of the appearance of objects moving in space is related to their manual object exploration ability. Fifty-five 7- to 8-month-old infants were tested. A visual object prediction paradigm was developed during which a three-dimensional object was presented in a live eye-tracking setting. During familiarization, the object rotated back and forth along the vertical axis. While the object was moving, two target parts of it were briefly occluded from view and uncovered again as the object changed its direction of motion. In the test phase, the entire object was rotated around 90° and now rotated along the horizontal axis. We recorded infants’ eye movements directed at the target locations and analyzed the prediction rates. All of the infants also participated in a manual object exploration task, in which they freely explored five toy blocks. Infants with a higher level of object exploration skill had higher prediction rates during test trials as compared to infants with less proficient object exploratory actions. The results support the interpretation that advanced manual object exploration experience is associated with infants’ advanced visual prediction ability of the appearance of objects moving in space. From birth, infants are fascinated by seeing objects. However, if objects move in space in a cluttered environment, like when a ball rolls behind the sofa, or if the infants’ point of view changes, the objects or object parts are recurrently occluded. To over- come this period of nonvisibility, infants need to visually predict how these temporarily occluded objects could behave in their spatial environment. This requires an updating of the mental representation of the object, as well as an accurate visual anticipation of the motion trajectory and the location of object reappearance. Correspondingly, track- ing spatial transformations of objects requires several predictive processes. It is already known that visual predictive abilities that are related to the prediction of linear object motion emerge early in infancy (Gredeb€ ack & von Hofsten, 2004). Correspondence should be sent to Claudia Kubicek, Department of Developmental Psychology, Otto- Behaghel-Str. 10F, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen 35394, Germany. E-mail: claudia.kubicek@psychol.uni- giessen.de Infancy, 1–17, 2017 Copyright © International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) ISSN: 1525-0008 print / 1532-7078 online DOI: 10.1111/infa.12195 THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF INFANT STUDIES