With or without a hole: young infants' sensitivity for topological versus geometric property.

Evidence from adult psychophysics, brain imaging, and honeybee's behaviour has been reported to support the notion that topological properties are the primitives of visual representation (Chen, 1982 Science 218 699-700). Here, we ask how the sensitivity to topological property might originate during development. Specifically, we tested 1.

Discriminating "top-heavy" versus "bottom-heavy" geometric patterns in 2- to 4.5-month-old infants.

Simion, Valenza, Macchi Cassia, Turati, and Umiltà (2002) suggested that newborns preferred "top-heavy" stimuli and such bias may account for neonatal face preference. However, convergent evidence for the discriminability between the top-heavy versus bottom-heavy patterns has not been demonstrated. We used a modified familiarization/novelty procedure (Chien, Palmer, & Teller, 2003) to assess basic discriminability between "top-heavy" and "bottom-heavy" geometric patterns in 2- to 4.