Contextual Effects in Infant Visual Perception

A familiarization/preference technique was used to assess the ability of three- and four-month-old infants to discriminate line segments that differed in orientation. Discrimination was found to be significantly better, as evidenced by a greater preference for the novel stimulus, when the line segments were embedded in a redundant contextual frame than when they were presented alone. However this effect could not always be unambiguously interpreted; under some stimulus conditions, a strong stimulus preference may have caused the novelty effect. It is concluded that perception in infants is, at least in part, organized and, as in adults, involves more than a simple feature-by-feature analysis of information.