Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When tested on siuprise or preferential looking tasks, young infants show an understanding that objects continue to exist even though they are no longer directly perceivable. Only later do infants show a similar level of competence when tested on retrieval tasks. Hence, a developmental lag is apparent between infants' knowledge as measured by passive response tasks, and their ability to demonstrate that knowledge in an active retrieval task. W e jwesent a connectionist model which learns to track and initiate a motor response towards objects. The model exhibits a capacity to maintain a representation of the object even when it is no longer directly perceptible, and acquires implicit tracking competence before the ability to initiate a manual response to a hidden object. A study with infants confirms the model's prediction concerning improved tracking performance at higher object velocities. It is suggested that the developmental lag is a direct consequence of the need to co-ordinate representations which themselves emerge through learning.