Can infants use interposition and line junction cues to infer three-dimensional (3D) structure? Previous work has shown that in a task that required 4-month-olds to discriminate between static two-dimensional (2D) pictures of possible and impossible cubes, infants exhibited a spontaneous preference for displays of the impossible cube but left open…

Although object-based attention enhances perceptual processing of information appearing within the boundaries of a selected object, little is known about the consequences for information in the object's surround. The authors show that distance from an attended object's center of mass determines reaction time (RT) to targets in the surround. Of 2…

Results suggest that when the internal element of a compound stimulus is a highly preferred or salient stimulus, young infants will process information about its characteristics. (Author/DB)

The preference for color or form as bases for similarity judgments among preschoolers (ages 2-5) and its relationship to the differentiation of form and color concepts as indexed by discrimination, identification, and labeling were investigated. (SB)

Two different methods which minimize achromatic cues were used to test the ability of one-month-olds to discriminate gray from broadband blue. Test data imply an improvement between birth and one month of age in the discrimination of gray from broadband blue. Possible physiological changes underlying this improvement are discussed. (Author/RWB)

The hypothesis that perceptual development proceeds from less to greater dimensional separability was tested by giving a speeded classification task to first and fourth graders. Results supported the hypothesis that development proceeds toward greater flexibility of attention rather than simply toward increasing separability. (Author/DB)

Object substitution masking (OSM) is said to occur when a perceptual object is hypothesized that is mismatched by subsequent sensory evidence, leading to a new hypothesized object being substituted for the first. For example, when a brief target is accompanied by a longer lasting display of nonoverlapping mask elements, reporting of target…

Four experiments assessed converging aspects of four-month-old infants' perceptions of visual patterns. Results together corroborate and extend previous findings that vertical symmetry has a special status in early perceptual development and that infants can perceive pattern wholes. (Author/AS)

Three experiments are described which relate to models of infant visual preferences and to the ways in which preferences can be modified or created by habituation. Results suggest that the Banks and Salapatek's contrast sensitivity model can be a powerful predictor of preferential looking in newborns and that preferences based on experience can be…

The purpose of this paper is to set out a descriptive model in which the relative dominance of a stimulus dimension is related to the form of attention it receives. (Author/DB)

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Tested infants' remembrance of the orientations and angular relations of line segments. In one experiment, infants "dishabituated" to a change in orientation but not a change in angle. In two further experiments, infants familiar with either an acute or obtuse angle gave strong novelty preferences to a different angle. (BC)

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

This study compared the use of discrete and relational aspects of visual configurations in making similarity judgments. Subjects were 3-, 4-, 5-, and 8-year-old children and adults. (BD)

Findings were: it did not matter whether the seriation involved the hues used in subsequent tasks or other hues; the presence or absence of reinforcement during perceptual pretraining did not affect pretraining, training, or transposition behavior; and seriation pretraining produced increased transposition in the intermediate-hue problem.…