Objects in a social world: Infants’ object representational capacity limits are shaped by objects' social relevance

Several decades of research have revealed consistent signature limits on infants’ ability to represent objects. However, these signature representational limits were established with methods that often removed objects from their most common context. In infants’ everyday lives, objects are very often social artifacts: they are the targets of agents’ goal-directed actions, communications, and beliefs, and may have social content or relevance themselves. In this chapter, we explore the relationship between infants’ object representational capacity limits and their processing of the social world. We review evidence that the social content and context of objects can shift infants’ object representational limits. We discuss how taking the social world into account can yield more robust and ecologically valid estimates of infants’ early representational capacities.