Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have an intuitive understanding of physics. They canpredict how a physical scene will unfold, and reason about howit came to be. Adults may rely on such a physical representa-tion for visual reasoning and recognition, going beyond visualfeatures and capturing objects in terms of their physical prop-erties. Recently, the use of draped objects in recognition wasused to examine adult object representations in the absence ofmany common visual features. In this paper we examine youngchildren’s reasoning about draped objects in order to examinethe develop of physical object representation. In addition, weargue that a better understanding of the development of theconcept of cloth as a physical entity is worthwhile in and ofitself, as it may form a basic ontological category in intuitivephysical reasoning akin to liquids and solids. We use two ex-periments to investigate young children’s (ages 3–5) reasoningabout cloth-covered objects, and find that they perform signif-icantly above chance (though far from perfectly) indicating arepresentation of physical objects that can interact dynamicallywith the world. Children’s success and failure pattern is similaracross the two experiments, and we compare it to adult behav-ior. We find a small effect, which suggests the specific featuresthat make reasoning about certain objects more difficult maycarry into adulthood.