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)

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

This study followed the development of visual preferences in a single infant from birth to 10 weeks of age. The stimuli used were 5 x 10 item arrays of squares of lines in which a 3 x 3 target matrix of the other figure type (line or square) was embedded. The direction of first fixation and the total time spent looking at each side were determined…

Results of a study of the pictorial preferences of seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children of two cultures indicated that "soft contours were generally preferred in both cultures, as were natural images--with the exception that older American girls prefer geometric elements. (JM)

Visual acuity as a function of target position and density was measured in a letter recognition task. A homogeneous pattern of equally-spaced elements was tachistoscopically exposed, where the target was never located at the boundaries of the pattern. The target was marked with a spatial cue to control attentional processes. With such a spatial…

Visual fixations were recorded in newborn, 4-, and 8-week-old human infants as they scanned displays that varied in contour length, size, number, and a new metric, CVAL (based on Contour Variability, Amount and Location). One of the findings was that both contour length and CVAL separately accounted for approximatel1 95 of looking-duration…

The attentional blink refers to the finding that the 2nd of 2 targets embedded in a stream of rapidly presented distractors is often missed. Whereas most theories of the attentional blink focus on limited-capacity processes that occur after target selection, the present work investigates the selection process itself. Identifying a target letter…