Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.
Age-related deficits in categorization of positive and negative emotions are caused by different mechanisms. Because negative emotions are perceptually similar, they cause high categorization demands. Elderly people may need more evidence in favor of the target emotion than younger people, and they make mistakes if this surplus of evidence is missing. In contrast, perceptually distinct happy faces were easily identified, and elderly people only failed when the presentation time was too short for their slower perceptual processing.
Order and disorder are prevalent in everyday life, yet little is known about the neural real-time processing that occurs during the perception of disorder relative to order. In the present study, from a cognitive perspective, by adopting the ERP method, we aimed to examine the elicited real-time neural signals of disorder and order perception when participants processed physical environmental and basic visual disorder and order pictures in an irrelevant red or green rectangle detection task, and we attempted to test the hypothesis of cognitive disfluency in disorder perception. Generally, we observed that at each measured time interval, the ERPs elicited by order stimuli were more positive (less negative) in amplitude than those elicited by disorder stimuli at the frontal electrodes (represented by F7/F8, FT7/FT8, Fz, and FCz), whereas at the posterior electrodes (represented by P7/P8, PO7/PO8, Pz, and POz), the opposite was true. These data reveal for the first time the neural underpinnings of disorder and order perception, extending our understanding of the nature of disorder and order. This study also contributes to the cognitive fluency literature and indirectly expands the research on disorder and order stimuli in cognitive fluency.
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