Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…

Examines evidence that the research community studying infants' object concept and the community concerned with adult object-based attention have been studying the same natural kind. Maintains that the discovery that the object representations of young infants are the same as the object files of mid-level visual cognition has implications for both…

Responds to Needham and Baillargeon's criticisms and offers an alternative resolution of the conflicting results between the laboratories regarding abilities of infants less than 12 months to use property/featural information for object individuation. Maintains that kind concepts are acquired as infants approach their first birthday and that…