The study of object cognition over the past 25 years has proceeded in two largely non-interacting camps. One camp has studied object-based visual attention in adults, while the other has studied the object concept in infants. We briefly review both sets of literature and distill from the adult research a theoretical model that we apply to findings from the infant studies. The key notion in our model of object representation is the `sticky' index, a mechanism of selective attention that points at a physical object in a location. An object index does not represent any of the properties of the entity at which it points. However, once an index is pointing to an object, the properties of that object can be examined and featural information can be associated with, or `bound' to, its index. The distinction between indexing and feature binding underwrites the distinction between object individuation and object identification, a distinction that turns out to be crucial in both the adult attention and the infant object-concept literature. By developing the indexing model, we draw together two disparate sets of literature and suggest new ways to study object-based attention in infancy.

中文翻译：

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索引和对象概念：开发“什么”和“哪里”系统

在过去的 25 年中，对象认知的研究在两个基本上不相互作用的阵营中进行。一个阵营研究了成人基于对象的视觉注意，而另一个阵营研究了婴儿的对象概念。我们简要回顾了这两套文献，并从成人研究中提炼出一个我们应用于婴儿研究结果的理论模型。我们的对象表示模型中的关键概念是“粘性”索引，这是一种指向某个位置的物理对象的选择性注意机制。对象索引不代表它指向的实体的任何属性。但是，一旦索引指向一个对象，就可以检查该对象的属性，并且可以将特征信息与其索引关联或“绑定”到其索引。索引和特征绑定之间的区别支持了对象个性化和对象识别之间的区别，事实证明，这种区别在成人注意力和婴儿对象概念文献中都至关重要。通过开发索引模型，我们汇集了两组不同的文献，并提出了研究婴儿期基于对象的注意力的新方法。