The Nature of Infants' Visual Expectations for Event Content

Recent studies have revealed that young infants can form expectations for the spatial location of future visual events. Four experiments examined whether 3-month-old infants also form expectations for content features of events, defined as an invariant color combination. Infants viewed a spatially alternating (left–right) sequence of varying pictures in which pictures on one side (invariant colors) always appeared with the same color combination (e.g., red/green), while on the other side (varied colors) the pictures appeared with any of 4 possible color combinations. Results indicated that infants formed a content expectation for the invariant color combination on the invariant side, such that their anticipatory responding was disrupted by a novel color combination event and by a novel pattern event. A dissociation between reactive and anticipatory eye movements in their sensitivity to the content manipulation suggests that infants' expectations for spatial and content information engage somewhat different processes.

[1]  J. Hoffman,et al.  The role of visual attention in saccadic eye movements , 1995, Perception & psychophysics.

[2]  Dianne F Catherwood,et al.  Assessing the primary moments in infant encoding of compound visual stimuli , 1996 .

[3]  D. Robinson,et al.  Shared neural control of attentional shifts and eye movements , 1996, Nature.

[4]  A. Gottfried,et al.  FAMILIARITY AND NOVELTY PREFERENCES IN INFANT RECOGNITION MEMORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR INFORMATION PROCESSING , 1982 .

[5]  Bruce F. Pennington,et al.  The development of future-oriented processes , 1994 .

[6]  M. Bornstein,et al.  Discrimination and matching within and between hues measured by reaction times: some implications for categorical perception and levels of information processing , 1984, Psychological research.

[7]  Leslie G. Ungerleider.  Two cortical visual systems , 1982 .

[8]  C. Rovee-Collier,et al.  Organization of infant memory. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[9]  B Younger.  Developmental change in infant categorization: the perception of correlations among facial features. , 1992, Child development.

[10]  Marshall M. Haith,et al.  The formation of expectations in early infancy , 1993 .

[11]  R. Parasuraman.  The attentive brain , 1998 .

[12]  M. Haith,et al.  Event-Specific Expectations of 2- and 3-Month-Old Infants. , 1992 .

[13]  C. Tamis-LeMonda,et al.  Infant Visual Expectation in Relation to Feature Learning , 1995 .

[14]  Richard J Krauzlis,et al.  Primacy of spatial information in guiding target selection for pursuit and saccades. , 2002, Journal of vision.

[15]  C. K. Rovee,et al.  Effects of quantitative shifts in a visual reinforcer on the instrumental response of infants. , 1976, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[16]  Martha J. Farah,et al.  The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision , 2000 .

[17]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  A Two Process Model of Infant Visual Attention. , 1972 .

[18]  D. Teller,et al.  Color vision and brightness discrimination in two-month-old human infants. , 1975, Science.

[19]  C. Hofsten.  Predictive reaching for moving objects by human infants , 1980 .

[20]  Ruxandra Sireteanu,et al.  Texture segregation in infants and children , 1992, Behavioural Brain Research.

[21]  L B Cohen,et al.  Infant habituation and generalization to differing degrees of stimulus novelty. , 1971, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[22]  Textons, visual pop-out effects, and object recognition in infancy. , 1992, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[23]  M. Haith,et al.  Expectation and Anticipation of Dynamic Visual Events by 3.5-Month-Old Babies. , 1988 .

[24]  Nikos K Logothetis,et al.  The color-opponent and broad-band channels of the primate visual system , 1990, Trends in Neurosciences.

[25]  Marshall M. Haith,et al.  Young Infants' Visual Expectations for Symmetric and Asymmetric Stimulus Sequences. , 1991 .

[26]  Lorraine E. Bahrick,et al.  Do infants perceive invariant tempo and rhythm in auditory-visual events? , 1997 .

[27]  J. Fagan.  Memory in the infant. , 1970, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[28]  M. Haith,et al.  Infant visual response to gestalt geometric forms , 1984 .

[29]  I. Biederman,et al.  Size invariance in visual object priming , 1992 .

[30]  M. Haith,et al.  Infants' acquisition of spatiotemporal expectations. , 1998, Developmental psychology.

[31]  K. Nelson.  Organization of visual-tracking responses in human infants. , 1968, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[32]  D. Saville.  Multiple Comparison Procedures: The Practical Solution , 1990 .

[33]  Gundeep Behl‐Chadha,et al.  Infant categorization of left-right spatial relations , 1995 .

[34]  B. Dosher,et al.  The role of attention in the programming of saccades , 1995, Vision Research.

[35]  Carolyn Rovee-Collier,et al.  The memorability and discriminability of primitive perceptual units in infancy , 1994, Vision Research.

[36]  C. K. Rovee,et al.  Psychophysical scaling of stimulus similarity in 3-month-old infants and adults. , 1976, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[37]  C. Rovee-Collier,et al.  Levels-of-processing effects in infant memory? , 1998, Child development.

[38]  A. Slater,et al.  Infant recognition memory following brief stimulus exposure , 1983 .

[39]  The relationship between infant habituation and infant information processing , 1988 .

[40]  Paul C. Quinn,et al.  On Categorization in Early Infancy. , 1986 .

[41]  Mark H. Johnson.  Cortical Maturation and the Development of Visual Attention in Early Infancy , 1990, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[42]  S. Shimojo,et al.  Infants' fast saccades in the gap paradigm and development of visual attention☆ , 1997 .

[43]  J. Schall,et al.  Role of frontal eye fields in countermanding saccades: visual, movement, and fixation activity. , 1998, Journal of neurophysiology.

[44]  D. Teller,et al.  Discrimination of chromatic from white light by two-month-old human infants , 1978, Vision Research.

[45]  E. G. Keating,et al.  Frontal eye field lesions impair predictive and visually-guided pursuit eye movements , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.

[46]  Carolyn Rovee-Collier,et al.  Ontogeny of early event memory. II: Encoding and retrieval by 2- and 3-month-olds , 1986 .

[47]  D. Maurer,et al.  Newborns' discrimination of chromatic from achromatic stimuli. , 1986, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[48]  B. Bertenthal,et al.  Development of visual organization: the perception of subjective contours. , 1980, Child development.

[49]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[50]  John Colombo,et al.  Discrimination learning during the first year: stimulus and positional cues , 1990 .

[51]  C. Hofsten.  Catching Skills in Infancy , 1983 .

[52]  Robert S. Siegler,et al.  Cognitive Variability: A Key to Understanding Cognitive Development , 1994 .

[53]  C. Rovee-Collier,et al.  Perceptual asymmetry and memory retrieval in 3-month-old infants , 1998 .

[54]  J. Dineen,et al.  Developmental changes in visual orienting behavior to featural versus structural information in the human infant. , 1980, Developmental psychobiology.

[55]  R H Day,et al.  Visual shape perception in early infancy. , 1979, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[56]  R. Aslin,et al.  Visual tracking as an index of the object concept , 1978 .

[57]  A SIMPLE METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC PRESENTATION OF SEQUENCES OF AUDITORY AND VISUAL STIMULI. , 1965, British journal of psychology.

[58]  R. L. Fantz,et al.  Pattern vision in young infants , 1958 .

[59]  R. L. Fantz.  Visual Experience in Infants: Decreased Attention to Familiar Patterns Relative to Novel Ones , 1964, Science.

[60]  A. Slater,et al.  Size constancy at birth: newborn infants' responses to retinal and real size. , 1990, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[61]  M. Haith.  Future-oriented processes in infancy: The case of visual expectations. , 1993 .

[62]  W. Wilson,et al.  A note on the incosistency inherent in the necessity to perform multiple comparisons. , 1962, Psychological bulletin.

[63]  R J Krauzlis,et al.  Discharge properties of neurons in the rostral superior colliculus of the monkey during smooth-pursuit eye movements. , 2000, Journal of neurophysiology.

[64]  D L Robinson,et al.  Covert orienting of attention in macaques. III. Contributions of the superior colliculus. , 1995, Journal of neurophysiology.

[65]  R. Krauzlis,et al.  Neural Correlates of Target Choice for Pursuit and Saccades in the Primate Superior Colliculus , 2002, Neuron.

[66]  R. Bhatt,et al.  Discrepancy detection and developmental changes in attentional engagement in infancy , 1999 .

[67]  A. Treisman,et al.  A feature-integration theory of attention , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[68]  A. Slater,et al.  Visual memory at birth. , 1982, British journal of psychology.

[69]  B. Younger,et al.  Infant categorization: memory for category-level and specific item information. , 1990, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[70]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Components of Visual Orienting in Early Infancy: Contingency Learning, Anticipatory Looking, and Disengaging , 1991, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[71]  P. Mundy.  Compound-stimulus information processing by 3-month-old infants. , 1985, The Journal of genetic psychology.

[72]  V. R. Carlson,et al.  Infant perception of the invariant shape of objects varying in slant. , 1979, Child development.

[73]  Janette Atkinson,et al.  Disengaging visual attention in the infant and adult , 1993 .

[74]  J S Werner,et al.  Habituation, response to novelty, and dishabituation in human infants: tests of a dual-process theory of visual attention. , 1986, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[75]  P. Salapatek.  Chapter 3 – Pattern Perception in Early Infancy1 , 1975 .

[76]  S. Adler.  Selective integration of temporally distinct perceptual information in infant memory , 1997 .

[77]  L. Bahrick,et al.  Intermodal perception of adult and child faces and voices by infants. , 1998, Child development.

[78]  The scanning of compound figures by young infants. , 1983, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[79]  Dianne F Catherwood,et al.  Exploring the seminal phase in infant memory for color and shape , 1994 .

[80]  B. Crassini,et al.  Infant response to stimuli of similar hue and dissimilar shape: tracing the origins of the categorization of objects by hue. , 1989, Child development.

[81]  C. Hofsten,et al.  Observations on the development of reaching for moving objects. , 1979, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[82]  B. Younger.  The segregation of items into categories by ten-month-old infants. , 1985, Child development.

[83]  P. Quinn,et al.  Visual pop-out in young infants: Convergent evidence and an extension , 1998 .

[84]  Marshall M. Haith,et al.  Stability of Visual Expectations at 3.0 Months of Age. , 1990 .

[85]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Attention-getting and attention-holding processes of infant visual preferences. , 1972, Child development.

[86]  D. Rose,et al.  Models of the visual cortex , 1985 .

[87]  A. Slater,et al.  Visual Processing of Stimulus Compounds in Newborn Infants , 1991, Perception.

[88]  D. Berlyne.  The influence of the albedo and complexity of stimuli on visual fixation in the human infant. , 1958, British journal of psychology.

[89]  Bruch M. Hood,et al.  Inhibition of return produced by covert shifts of visual attention in 6-month-old infants , 1993 .

[90]  R. Day,et al.  Infant Perception of the Invariant Size of Approaching and Receding Objects , 1981 .

[91]  S. Lisberger,et al.  Attention and target selection for smooth pursuit eye movements , 1995, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[92]  Barbara A. Younger,et al.  Developmental change in infants' perception of correlations among attributes. , 1986, Child development.

[93]  Marshall M. Haith,et al.  Infants form temporal visual expectations based on the average rate of information flow , 1998 .

[94]  Barbara A. Younger,et al.  Infant perception of angular relations , 1984 .

[95]  J. Colombo,et al.  Individual differences in infant visual attention: are short lookers faster processors or feature processors? , 1991, Child development.