Transient preferences for repetitive visual stimuli in human infancy.

Sudden events and sharp discontinuities in the external world act as powerful attention attractors in adult humans. Does this reflex-like orienting towards targets deviating from their surround occur in early infancy? Here, we present evidence that, during the first months of life, infants orient preferentially towards repetitive visual patterns, rather than towards uniquely deviating targets. At 3-4 years of age, toddlers show an adult-like pattern of preferences.

Perceptual learning of highly demanding visual search tasks.

Inefficient visual search can become efficient with practice [Vision Research 35 (1995) 2037; 40 (2000) 2925]. In this study, we wondered whether this improvement depends on unique visual features associated with the target, on differences in item-specific brightness distribution between target and distractors, or only on a change in the allocation of attention and thus global search strategy. We found that both, unique visual features and differences in brightness distribution lead to parallelisation with practice of originally inefficient search.