Melissa Kibbe
University of Massachusetts Boston
Subject Listing - Psychology
Advisor: Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy
Friday, Oral Session 5, Presentation 5, Carmichael Hall 131
INFANTS' ATTENTION TO COLOR- AND SPATIAL FREQUENCY-DEFINED OBJECTS
HYPOTHESIS: Basic visual functions develop rapidly during the first year of life. Since infants' endogenous attention system is not yet quite matured, visual salience has an almost exclusive role in controlling their visual attention. However, no previous research has attempted to systematically study the relationship between detectability and salience in infants and to compare the salience of different visual features.
METHODS: We measured detection thresholds and salience relations between iso-detectable stimuli using the forced-choice preferential looking technique in 6-month-old infants. Detection: Stimuli consisted of a dense 20x20 array of randomly oriented Gabor patches, where a 3x4 region that differed from the background elements in either color (red saturation: 6-31% , background: 0%) or spatial frequency (1.5-4.5cpd, background: 1 cpd) appeared either on the left or the right side of the field. Salience: Two equally detectable (70% preference for color vs. SF) stimuli were pitted against each other on the same background as in the detection task. Gaze directions were coded in both experiments. A total of twenty-five 6-month-old infants participated.
RESULTS: We successfully measured detection thresholds for color and for spatial frequency. In the second part of the study, we found that detectability was not sufficient to predict salience: iso-detectable spatial frequency-defined stimuli were more salient than color-defined stimuli (61% preference).
CONCLUSION: Our conclusions contradict the predictions of an early model of infants' visual preference by Banks and Salapatek (1981). In our future studies, we plan to explore other regions of the feature space to further support a new theoretical model of visual salience.
University of Massachusetts Boston
Department of Psychology
Advisor: Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA