The difference between major and minor scales plays a central role in Western music. However, recent research using random tone sequences ("tone-scrambles") has revealed a dramatically bimodal distribution in sensitivity to this difference: 30% of listeners are near perfect in classifying major versus minor tone-scrambles; the other 70% perform near chance. Here, whether or not infants show this same pattern is investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn adulthood, research has demonstrated that surrounding the spatial location of attentional focus is a suppressive field, resulting from top-down attention promoting the processing of relevant stimuli and inhibiting surrounding distractors (e.g., Hopf et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which they saw centrally presented stimuli followed by a target appearing on either the left or right side of the screen. Halfway through the trials, the central stimuli reliably predicted targets' locations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdvances in our understanding of long-term memory in early infancy have been made possible by studies that have used the Rovee-Collier's mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm and its variants. One function that has been attributed to long-term memory is the formation of expectations (Rovee-Collier & Hayne, 1987); consequently, a long-term memory representation should be established during expectation formation. To examine this prediction and potentially open the door on a new paradigm for exploring infants' long-term memory, using the Visual Expectation Paradigm (Haith, Hazan, & Goodman, 1988), 3-month-old infants were trained to form an expectation for predictable color and spatial information of picture events and emit anticipatory eye movements to those events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
November 2015
Little is known about the role that the birth experience plays in brain and cognitive development. Recent research has suggested that birth experience influences the development of the somatosensory cortex, an area involved in spatial attention to sensory information. In this study, we explored whether differences in spatial attention would occur in infants who had different birth experiences, as occurs for caesarean versus vaginal delivery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSearch asymmetry is characterized by the detection of a feature-present target amidst feature-absent distractors being efficient and unaffected by the number of distractors, whereas detection of a feature-absent target amidst feature-present distractors is typically inefficient and affected by the number of distractors. Although studies have attempted to investigate this phenomenon with infants (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has indicated that the ability to integrate individual elements in the presence of noise is immature in 3-month-old infants. The present study extended the developmental timeline by investigating 6-month-olds' ability to integrate individual elements into whole contours through an assessment of their capability to discriminate circle and square contours constructed from oriented Gabor patches via a newly designed cueing paradigm for infants. If infants discriminate the centrally-presented contour cues, then their eye movements would correctly anticipate subsequent target presentation at a rate greater than chance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual search studies with adults have shown that stimuli that contain a unique perceptual feature pop out from dissimilar distractors and are unaffected by the number of distractors. Studies with very young infants have suggested that they too might exhibit pop-out. However, infant studies have used paradigms in which pop-out is measured in seconds or minutes, whereas in adults pop-out occurs in milliseconds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have examined the facilitative effects of prior spatial information on target selection for saccadic eye movements. More recently, studies have shown that prior spatial information also influences target selection for smooth pursuit. However, direct comparisons of the effects of prior information on target selection for pursuit and saccades have not been made.
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