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I'm reading an article about "object permanence" in Wikipedia. Here is a link to the article. This is the part I'm having trouble to understand:

Evidence suggests that infants use a variety of cues while studying an object and their perception of the object's permanence can be tested without physically hiding the object. Rather, the object is occluded, slightly obstructed, from the infants view and they are left only other visual cues, such as examining the object from different trajectories. It was also found that the longer an infant focuses on an object may be due to detected discontinuities in their visual field, or the flow of events, with which the infant has become familiar.

Could you please explain a bit about the bolded part? Does it mean "detected discontinuities in the visual field of young children, or the flow of events, causes the children to spend more time looking at the object"? And, what does that "which" refer to? The flow of events, or looking at the object, or both?

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    Unfortunately, the sentence with the highlighted section is unpleasantly ungrammatical, probably as the result of edits that didn't rework the earlier bits after shifting the sentence around.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Nov 13, 2015 at 4:48
  • There are all kinds of errors present in Wikipedia articles..
    – CowperKettle
    Nov 13, 2015 at 6:36
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    Just for the record: "...I'm having trouble understanding..."
    – Justin Young
    Nov 13, 2015 at 11:19

1 Answer 1

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It seems that the author originally intended to use grammatical construct "the ... the ...", which introduces proportionality between conditions or actions, as in

The more he watched her play, the easier he believed...
The closer we come to the solution, the more difficult it appears.

See an explanation here.

In your sentence the word "longer" should probably be replaced with "length of time", making the phrase

It was also found that the length of time an infant focuses on an object may be due to detected discontinuities in their visual field, or the flow of events,...

Or, it ought to be rephrased as

It was also found that the longer an infant focuses on an object the more obvious are the discontinuities in their visual field, or the flow of events,...

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