Contrasting preschoolers’ verbal reasoning in an object-individuation task with young infants’ preverbal feats

•Preschoolers fail to infer a second object from a discontinuous movement.•Our findings are in contrast to those from infancy research.•Children’s difficulties are not due to a verbal deficiency or inappropriate looking.•Children’s single-object bias is explained by top-down influences of prior beli...

Ausführliche Beschreibung