Abstract
Research in the past decades has investigated the time course of the acquisition of physical knowledge in early development in much detail. However, few is known about the motives that actually lead infants to interact with the objects of their physical world. The research presented here investigated in two experiments if 11-month-old infants' reaches for objects are guided by preferences for particular object features. To this end, infants in Experiment 1 (n = 16) could choose in a preferential reaching task between an object made of sponge or wood. In Experiment 2, infants (n = 16) could again choose between a sponge and a wooden object. This time, however, the objects differed also in their weight (light or heavy). The results of both experiment show that infants preferred to interact with the sponge rather than the wooden object, independent of the weight of the object. This suggests that material preferences play an important role in infants' object interactions and that these material preferences can even override the different action affordances of the light and heavy object.