Assessed 14-week-olds' attention to green or red target objects moving in a field of distracting objects that varied in color. Found that infants' detection of green moving targets was masked in the presence of mixed red and green objects. Masking was not observed for red targets or for green targets in a field of green objects. (BC)

Infants were habituated to reversible and nonreversible pictures of faces. The reversible picture depicted a different face when inverted 180 degrees. For the reversible picture, the infants devoted more visual attention to the inverted picture than to the original picture. (BC)

The relative efficacy with which appearance of a new object orients visual attention was investigated. At issue is whether the visual system treats onset as being of particular importance or only 1 of a number of stimulus events equally likely to summon attention. Using the 1-shot change detection paradigm, the authors compared detectability of…

A flashed stimulus is perceived as spatially lagging behind a moving stimulus when they are spatially aligned. When several elements are perceptually grouped into a unitary moving object, a flash presented at the leading edge of the moving stimulus suffers a larger spatial lag than a flash presented at the trailing edge (K. Watanabe. R. Nijhawan.…

The relationship between luminance (i.e., the photometric intensity of light) and its perception (i.e., sensations of lightness or brightness) has long been a puzzle. In addition to the mystery of why these perceptual qualities do not scale with luminance in any simple way, "illusions" such as simultaneous brightness contrast, Mach bands,…

We present a technique called Random Image Structure Evolution (RISE) for use in experimental investigations of high-level visual perception. Potential applications of RISE include the quantitative measurement of perceptual hysteresis and priming, the study of the neural substrates of object perception, and the assessment and detection of subtle…

Recent research indicates that infants first use form and then surface features as the basis for individuating objects. However, very little is known about the underlying basis for infants' differential sensitivity to form than surface features. The present research assessed infants' sensitivity to luminance differences. Like other surface…

The authors devised a prestimulus-probe method to assess the allocation of attention as a function of participants' top-down expectancies concerning distractor and target locations. Participants performed the flanker task, and distractor locations remained fixed. On some trials, instead of the flanker display, either 2 simultaneous dots or a…

The authors examined how visual selection mechanisms may relate to developing cognitive functions in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants were tested in 2 tasks on the same day: perceptual completion and visual search. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently presented with …

This study is an initial investigation of the effects of a fading procedure upon acquisition and transfer of discrimination learning with children younger than 36 months of age. (CS)

This study examined the hypothesis that the effective visual field of 5-year-old children is smaller than that of 8-year-old children and adults. In addition, an effort was made to determine whether task demands affect the size of the effective visual field and if so, whether the effects on performance are different for children and adults. A…

This study tested the hypothesis that newborns selectively orient toward angular elements in their visual field. Subjects were 36 awake and alert infants under 6 days of age. For each newborn, the study compared visual attention to three separately presented stimulus patterns: a complete outline triangle, only the sides of this triangle, and only…

Short-term changes in visual behavior observed in 80 infants (3-9 months) parallel changes observed across age by Piaget and fit well his assumption that the infant's increasingly sophisticated action patterns evolve by successive accomodations to encountered phenomenon. (WY)

Paper is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Case Western Reserve University. (WY)