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Colour pop‐out in infant response to visual arrays
Author(s) -
Catherwood Di,
Skoien Petra,
Holt Christine
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1996.tb00708.x
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , visual field , visual search , visual perception , audiology , schematic , recognition memory , developmental psychology , cognition , communication , cognitive psychology , perception , neuroscience , medicine , electronic engineering , engineering
In order to assess whether infant attention is drawn to discrepancies in the colour of items in the visual field, 24 infants (mean age: 5 months, 2 weeks) were familiarized over a series of brief exposures to visual arrays comprised of triads of schematic faces, with one of these (the target) presented in a different colour to the other two (the distractors). Greater attention to, and hence encoding of, the target item would suggest that infants use colour to segment or parse visual arrays in a manner resembling adult “pop‐out” effects. This was determined in regard to recognition of the colour and shape of target and distractors on a series of paired‐comparison tests. The only evidence of recognition on these tests was for the colour and shape of the target item, indicating that the infants had experienced colour pop‐out effects. A further experiment, with 24 infants of comparable age and using the same basic procedure as in the first experiment, examined the effect of doubling the number of distractor stimuli in the familiarization arrays. The only evidence of recognition in this case was for the colour of the target stimulus. These results are considered in regard to the question of whether the infants processed the arrays in a parallel or serial way.