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Infants' Use of Constraints to Speed Information Processing and to Anticipate Events
Author(s) -
Dougherty Thomas M.,
Haith Marshall M.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
infancy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1532-7078
pISSN - 1525-0008
DOI - 10.1207/s15327078in0304_03
Subject(s) - psychology , fixation (population genetics) , measure (data warehouse) , information processing , cognitive psychology , audiology , neuroscience , computer science , medicine , data mining , population , environmental health
Two experiments were conducted with 28‐week‐old infants using a modification of the Visual Expectation Paradigm. The first sought to determine whether speed of information processing (SIP) could be assessed in infants using a reaction time (RT) measure and approach that is widely used to measure SIP in adults. Infants saw a center fixation cue followed by a peripheral target that could appear in 1, 2, or 4 locations. There was a linear increase in RT of eye movements as the number of locations increased from 1 to 2 and to 4 targets, suggesting that the paradigm does measure SIP. The second experiment asked whether varying the number of cue‐target pairings would augment or impair infant's SIP in the trade‐off between the benefit of additional information and the liability of additional memory load. The findings showed that the presence of cue information can eliminate the difference in RT between the 1‐ and 2‐location conditions, whereas no benefit of cue was obtained for the 4‐location condition.