Search

Do novel linguistic labels have privileged access to attentional resources compared to non-linguistic labels? This study explores this possibility through two experiments with a training and an attentional overlap task. Experiment 1 investigates how novel label and object-only stimuli influence resource allocation and disengagement of visual attention. Experiment 2 tests the impact of linguistic information on visual attention by comparing novel tones and labels. Because disengagement of attention is affected both by the salience of the perceptual stimulus and by the degree of familiarity with the stimulus to be disengaged from, we compared pupil size variations and saccade latency under different test conditions: (a) consistent with (i.e., identical to) the training; (b) inconsistent with the training (i.e., with an altered feature), and (c) deprived of one feature only in Experiment 1. Experiment 1 indicated a general consistency advantage (and deprived disadvantage) driven by linguistic label-object pairs compared to object-only stimuli. Experiment 2 revealed that tone-object pairs led to higher pupil dilation and longer saccade latency than linguistic label-object pairs. Our results suggest that novel linguistic labels preferentially impact the early orienting of attention.

Since subthreshold autistic social impairments aggregate in family members, and since attentional dysfunctions appear to be one of the earliest cognitive markers of children with autism, we investigated in the general population the relationship between infants' attentional functioning and the autistic traits measured in their parents. Orienting and alerting attention systems were measured in 8-month-old infants using a spatial cueing paradigm. Results showed that only paternal autistic traits were linked to their children's: (1) attentional disengagement; (2) rapid attentional orienting and (3) alerting. Our findings suggest that an early dysfunction of orienting and alerting systems might alter the developmental trajectory of future ability in social cognition and communication. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.

Visual attention is one of the infant's primary tools for gathering relevant information from the environment for further processing and learning. The space-based component of visual attention in infants has been widely investigated; however, the object-based component of visual attention has received scarce interest. This scarcity is surprising, given the importance of objects in driving infants' attention and predispositions to attend to object information. Here, we investigated the object-based component of attention in 8-month-old infants. An eye tracker measured the saccade latencies to find a target that could appear in a previously cued end of 2 bars (valid targets), in the other end of the cued bar (invalid same-object targets), or in the other bar but at the same distance from the cue (invalid different-object targets). Bars were unoccluded or partly occluded; if attention is object based, it should also operate on objects that require perceptual completion. After verifying in a sample of adults (Experiment 1) that a measure of saccade latency suitably assessed space-based and object-based attention, we tested 8-month-old infants (Experiment 2) using the same procedure. The results showed that in both adults and infants, target detection was faster for valid targets than for invalid ones (space-based effect). Moreover, for both the unoccluded and partly occluded conditions, detection was faster on invalid within-object trials than on invalid between-objects trials (object-based effect). These findings demonstrate that visual objects can operate as units of attention for infants by the age of 8 months, offering implications for cognitive development. © 2012 American Psychological Association.

Statistical learning – implicit learning of statistical regularities within sensory input – is a way of acquiring structure within continuous sensory environments. Statistics computation, initially shown to be involved in word segmentation, has been demonstrated to be a general mechanism that operates across domains, across time and space, and across species. Recently, statistical leaning has been reported to be present even at birth when newborns were tested with a speech stream. The aim of the present study was to extend this finding, by investigating whether newborns’ ability to extract statistics operates in multiple modalities, as found for older infants and adults. Using the habituation procedure, two experiments were carried out in which visual sequences were presented. Results demonstrate that statistical learning is a general mechanism that extracts statistics across domain since the onset of sensory experience. Intriguingly, present data reveal that newborn learner’s limited cognitive resources constrain the functioning of statistical learning, narrowing the range of what can be learned.

The present chapter deals with the topic of the ontogeny and development of face processing in the first months of life and is organized into two sections concerning face detection and face recognition. The first section focuses on the mechanisms underlying infants' visual preference for faces. Evidence is reviewed supporting the contention that newborns' face preferences is due to a set of non-specific constraints that stem from the general characteristics of the human visuo-perceptual system, rather than to a representational bias for faces. It is shown that infants' response to faces becomes more and more tuned to the face category over the first 3 months of life, revealing a gradual progressive specialization of the face-processing system. The second section sought to determine the properties of face recognition at birth. In particular, a series of experiments are presented to examine whether the inner facial part is processed and encoded when newborns recognize a face, and what kind of information - featural or configural - newborns' face recognition rely on. Overall, results are consistent with the existence of general constraints present at birth that tune the system to become specialized for faces later during development.

This study was aimed at investigating the face preference phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms at 3 months of age. Using an eye-tracker apparatus, Experiment 1 demonstrated that 3-month-olds prefer natural face images to unnatural ones, replicating and extending previous evidence obtained with schematic facelike stimuli. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the general mechanisms that induce face preference in newborns could not explain the same phenomenon at 3 months of age, when infants are attracted by perceptual cues more specific to faces. This suggests that signs of a process of cognitive specialization are already present in 3-month-olds' visual behavior toward faces. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Many studies demonstrated that newborns prefer upright faces over upside-down faces. Based on this evidence, some have suggested that faces represent a special class of stimuli for newborns and there is a qualitative difference between the processes involved in perception of facelike and non-facelike patterns (i.e., structural hypothesis). Others suggest that there is no reason to suppose that faces are different from other patterns, because faces, like any other classes of visual stimuli, are subject to filtering by the properties of the visual system (i.e., sensory hypothesis). The core question that will be adressed in the present paper is whether, to manifest itself, face preference requires the unique structure of the face, represented by the relative spatial location of its internal features, or rather some more general properties that other stimuli may also possess. Evidence will be presented supporting the idea that newborns do not respond to facelike stimuli by "facedness" but, rather, by some general structural characteristics that best satisfy the constraints of the immature visual system.

Rule learning is a mechanism that allows infants to recognize and generalize rule-like patterns, such as ABB or ABA. Although infants are better at learning rules from speech vs. non-speech, rule learning can be applied also to frequently experienced visual stimuli, suggesting that perceptual expertise with material to be learned is critical in enhancing rule learning abilities. Yet infants' rule learning has never been investigated using one of the most commonly experienced visual stimulus category available in infants' environment, i.e., faces. Here, we investigate 7-month-olds' ability to extract rule-like patterns from sequences composed of upright faces and compared their results to those of infants who viewed inverted faces, which presumably are encountered far less frequently than upright faces. Infants were habituated with face triads in either an ABA or ABB condition followed by a test phase with ABA and ABB triads composed of faces that differed from those showed during habituation. When upright faces were used, infants generalized the pattern presented during habituation to include the new face identities showed during testing, but when inverted faces were presented, infants failed to extract the rule. This finding supports the idea that perceptual expertise can modulate 7-month-olds' abilities to detect rule-like patterns.

Orienting visual attention allows us to properly select relevant visual information from a noisy environment. Despite extensive investigation of the orienting of visual attention in infancy, it is unknown whether and how stimulus characteristics modulate the deployment of attention from birth to 4 months of age, a period in which the efficiency in orienting of attention improves dramatically. The aim of the present study was to compare 4-month-old infants' and newborns' ability to orient attention from central to peripheral stimuli that have the same or different attributes. In Experiment 1, all the stimuli were dynamic and the only attribute of the central and peripheral stimuli to be manipulated was face orientation. In Experiment 2, both face orientation and motion of the central and peripheral stimuli were contrasted. The number of valid trials and saccadic latency were measured at both ages. Our results demonstrated that the deployment of attention is mainly influenced by motion at birth, while it is also influenced by face orientation at 4-month of age. These findings provide insight into the development of the orienting visual attention in the first few months of life and suggest that maturation may be not the only factor that determines the developmental change in orienting visual attention from birth to 4 months.

Object-based attention operates on perceptual objects, opening the possibility that the costs and benefits humans have to pay to move attention between-objects might be affected by the nature of the stimuli. The current study reported two experiments with adults and 8-month-old infants investigating whether object-based-attention is affected by the type of stimulus (faces vs. non-faces stimuli). Using the well-known cueing task developed by Egly et al. (1994) to study the object-based component of attention, in Experiment 1 adult participants were presented with two upright, inverted or scrambled faces and an eye-tracker measured their saccadic latencies to find a target that could appear on the same object that was just cued or on the other object that was uncued. Data showed that an object-based effect (a smaller cost to shift attention within- compared to between-objects) occurred only with scrambled face, but not with upright or inverted faces. In Experiment 2 the same task was performed with 8-month-old infants, using upright and inverted faces. Data revealed that an object-based effect emerges only for inverted faces but not for upright faces. Overall, these findings suggest that object-based attention is modulated by the type of stimulus and by the experience acquired by the viewer with different objects. © 2014 Valenza, Franchin and Bulf.

The ability to recognize and generalize abstract information in rule-like patterns is termed Rule Learning and is available from 7 months of age. Although some studies suggest the RL is domain-specific to language, others suggest that it is not specific to language and that the familiarity of the stimuli matters more than whether the input is linguistic or non-linguistic. The present study investigated 7-month-olds' Rule Learning using one of the most salient and familiar visual stimulus category available in infants' environment, that is faces. Findings support the idea that familiarity of the stimulus modulates infants' ability to extract abstract relations.

Recent studies have shown that infants' face recognition rests on a robust face representation that is resilient to a variety of facial transformations such as rotations in depth, motion, occlusion or deprivation of inner/outer features. Here, we investigated whether 3-month-old infants' ability to represent the invariant aspects of a face is affected by the presence of an external add-on element, i.e. a hat. Using a visual habituation task, three experiments were carried out in which face recognition was investigated by manipulating the presence/absence of a hat during face encoding (i.e. habituation phase) and face recognition (i.e. test phase). An eye-tracker system was used to record the time infants spent looking at face-relevant information compared to the hat. The results showed that infants' face recognition was not affected by the presence of the external element when the type of the hat did not vary between the habituation and test phases, and when both the novel and the familiar face wore the same hat during the test phase (Experiment 1). Infants' ability to recognize the invariant aspects of a face was preserved also when the hat was absent in the habituation phase and the same hat was shown only during the test phase (Experiment 2). Conversely, when the novel face identity competed with a novel hat, the hat triggered the infants' attention, interfering with the recognition process and preventing the infants' preference for the novel face during the test phase (Experiment 3). Findings from the current study shed light on how faces and objects are processed when they are simultaneously presented in the same visual scene, contributing to an understanding of how infants respond to the multiple and composite information available in their surrounding environment

This study investigated processing of number and extent in newborns. Using visual preference, we showed that newborns discriminated between small sets of dot collections relying solely on implicit numerical information when non-numerical continuous variables were strictly controlled (Experiment 1), and solely on continuous information when numerical variables were controlled (Experiment 2). When number and extent were pitted against each other (Experiment 3), newborns showed no visual preference, suggesting that the two variables play comparable roles in attracting newborns’ visual attention. In contrast to reports of dominance of continuous variables, these findings suggest that multiple dimensions attract newborns’ attention and guide their visual exploration

Il volume offre un panorama aggiornato dei modelli teorici che la psicologia ha elaborato per spiegare le cause e i meccanismi che determinano lo sviluppo della mente umana. Dopo aver affrontato nella prima parte le teorie classiche, le autrici passano in rassegna, nella seconda parte, i modelli più recenti relativi allo sviluppo cognitivo, sottolineandone gli aspetti interdisciplinari. È così illustrato con chiarezza il fondamentale ruolo che questo filone di ricerca svolge nell’indagine sull’architettura e sul funzionamento della mente umana.

The present study aimed to investigate whether perceptual completion is available at birth, in the absence of any visual experience. An extremely underspecified kinetic visual display composed of four spatially separated fragments arranged to give rise to an illusory rectangle that occluded a vertical rod (illusory condition) or rotated so as not to elicit perceptual grouping (control condition) was constructed. After newborns’ ability to detect the particular kind of rod-and-box display used in the present study had been probed (Experiment 1), they were habituated to the illusory rod-and-box display (Experiment 2), to the control display that did not contain illusory contours (Experiment 3), and to a standard real rod-and-box display akin to those used in previous infants’ studies (Experiment 4). Newborns perceived the rod as a connected unit either in the illusory condition (Experiment 2) or in the real condition (Experiment 4), as documented by a preference for a broken rod over a complete rod during the test phase, but not when the occluder was absent (Experiment 3). In all experiments newborns showed no preference between the two test stimuli (control condition), avoiding the possibility that newborns have a spontaneous preference for one test display over the other. Overall, the results of the present study provide evidence that the ability to achieve object unity (1)stems from intrinsic properties of the human perceptual system and (2) is operative from birth, given the right conditions.

The aim of the present study was to investigate how perceptual binding and selective attention operate during infants' and adults' visual search of an illusory figure. An eye-tracker system was used to test adults and infants in two conditions: illusory and non-illusory (real). In the illusory condition, a Kanizsa triangle was embedded among distractor pacmen which did not generate illusory contours. In the non-illusory condition, a real triangle was included in the same pacmen's display. The results showed that adults detected both the Kanizsa and the real figure automatically and without focal attention (experiment 1). In contrast, 6-month-old infants showed a pop-out effect only for the real figure (experiment 2). The failure of the illusory figure to trigger infants' attention was not due to infants' inability to perceive the illusory figure per se, as infants preferred the illusory figure over a non-illusory control stimulus in a classical preferential-looking task (experiment 3). Overall, these findings indicate that the illusory Kanizsa triangle triggers visual attention in adults, but not in infants, supporting evidence that at 6 months of age the binding processes involved in the perception of a Kanizsa figure do not operate in an adult-like manner.

L’obiettivo del presente lavoro è stato quello di indagare il ruolo dei processi percettivi (i.e. figural binding) e attentivi coinvolti nella percezione di una figura illusoria di Kanizsa. Nel primo esperimento si è cercato di individuare quali strategie visuo-eplorative vengono messe in atto per selezionare un triangolo illusorio di Kanizsa inserito in un insieme di elementi inducenti (pacman) e se le strategie visuo-esplorative coinvolte nell’individuazione del triangolo illusorio sono le stesse implicate nella selezione di un triangolo reale. Nel secondo esperimento è stato ridotto il numero dei pacman al fine di verificare se la selezione della figura illusoria coinvolge le stesse modalità attentive implicate nella selezione della figura reale. I risultati ottenuti attraverso la registrazione dei movimenti oculari dimostrano che la figura di Kanizsa e la figura reale vengono selezionate per prime e in minor tempo rispetto agli altri elementi presenti nel display e che sia lo stimolo illusorio che lo stimolo non illusorio sono selezionati senza l’intervento di una ricerca seriale dell’attenzione.

Past research has shown that top-heaviness is a perceptual property that plays a crucial role in triggering newborns’ preference toward faces. The present study examined the contribution of a second configural property, congruency, to newborns’ face preference. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that, when embedded in non-facelike stimuli, congruency induces a preference of the same strength of that induced by facedness. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that the attentional biases toward facedness and congruency produce a cumulative effect on newborns’ visual preferences according to an additive model. These findings were extended by those of Experiment 5, showing that the additive model holds true when congruency is added to top-heaviness in non-facelike stimuli displaying more elements in the upper portion.

Many studies have shown that newborns prefer (e.g. Goren, Sarty & Wu, 1975; Valenza, Simion, Macchi Cassia & Umiltà, 1996) and recognize (e.g. Bushnell, Say & Mullin, 1989; Pascalis & de Schonen, 1994) faces. However, it is not known whether, at birth, faces are still preferred and recognized when some of their parts are not visible because hindered by other configurations, that is when faces are partly occluded. Also, it is not known whether newborns’ preference for an upright over an inverted face and newborns’ face recognition are differentially affected depending on the salience of the occluded face features. Seventy-seven newborns (mean age of 43.5 hrs) were tested using the preferential looking (Experiment 1) and the habituation techniques (Experiment 2). Results demonstrated that newborns prefer and recognize occluded faces even if some portions of them are not available, at least when the hindered features are not salient. On the contrary, these abilities are affected by obscuring high salience facial features (i.e. eyes). However, while in the case of face detection, eyes occlusion completely prevented newborns’ face detection, in the case of face recognition an analogous stimulus manipulation heavily impaired, but did not totally preclude, newborns’ recognition performance. The data collected improve our comprehension of newborns’ way of processing and encoding information to detect and recognize faces.