Perception of relational invariants by newborns.

Abstract

Thirty healthy infants of less than I week of age were evaluated in a habituationrecovery paradigm for evidence of the ability to detect an invariant identity or nonidentity relationship between components of a visual stimulus. Infants who were initially habituated to stimuli consisting of two identical elements recovered fixation when the elements were rearranged to be dissimilar, and vice versa. A control group of infants who continued to see the familiarized stimuli at test yielded no recovery. To determine whether infants might have perceived the stimulus elements as a single pattern of figures rather than as two discrete figures in relationship, a second experiment was conducted in which circles that enclosed each element (and which were presumed to unitize each) were removed at test. Because infants in this condition recovered responding at test, it was concluded that the circles had been visible in the main experiment and that the elements may thus have been perceived as discrete.It is becoming increasingly clear that infants perceive a more organized and coherent world than previously suspected (Butterworth, 1983;Caron & Caron, 1982; Von Hofsten, 1983). Although this ability has been attributed to an inherent capacity to detect invariant relational or patterned information in the environmental flux (E.Gibson, 1969;J. Gibson, 1966J. Gibson, , 1979, evidence for such an inborn disposition remains inconclusive.Various studies with newborn infants do imply that the perceptual system is sensitive at birth to patterned properties of stimuli. For example, it has been shown that neonates can seemingly coordinate their own body movements with the rhythms of external speech sounds (Condon & Sander, 1974), and also that they will suck harder to hear a familiar voice in a familiar intonation rather than the same voice with altered intonation (Mehler, Bertoncini, Barriere, & Jassik-Gerschenfeld, 1978). Likewise, in the visual sphere, it has been reported that newborns can discriminate different facial expressions posed by the same person (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, & Cohen, 1982

Duplications and domain-generality.

“…Despite their importance for language, identity-relations can be perceived in many non-linguistic domains, and by many non-linguistic animals. Humans can compute identity matches for speech syllables, tones and visual objects (Dawson & Gerken, 2009;Endress et al, 2007;Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007;Marcus et al, 1999;Saffran, Pollak, Seibel, & Shkolnik, 2007), and are sensitive to the identity-relations from birth (Antell, Caron, & Myers, 1985;Gervain, Berent, & Werker, 2012;Gervain, Macagno, Cogoi, Peña, & Mehler, 2008), though such patterns might be easier to recognize with speech material (Marcus et al, 2007). Bees can compute identity-relations for colors, gratings and odors (Giurfa, Zhang, Jenett, Menzel, & Srinivasan, 2001 Adult speakers are better at detecting identity-patterns on vowels than on consonants, to the extent that they fail to detect the patterns on consonants (Toro, Bonatti, Nespor, & Mehler, 2008).…”

Visual discrimination and recognition of facial expressions of anger, fear, and surprise in 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants

“…At this time the infants also begin to scan the inner face extensively, and show an initial preference for the eyes (Haith, Bergman, & Moore, 1977;Maurer, 1985). Otherwise, the ability to abstract the invariant characteristics of stimuli seems to be inherent to the visual system; very simple configurations have been shown to be perceived in this way even by the newborn (Antell, Caron & Myers, 1985;Dodwell, Humphrey, & Muir, 1987). So, infants under 6 months visually scan faces in a manner consistent with being able to recognize facial expressions, and also prior to 6 months, infants' acuity and contrast sensitivity is such that they should have little trouble detecting the high contrast features that denote facial expressions.…”

Congruency as a Nonspecific Perceptual Property Contributing to Newborns’ Face Preference

“…First, there is considerable evidence that newborns are highly sensitive to configural–holistic properties emerging from the interrelations between the component parts of the stimuli. For instance, they can perceive the invariance of the spatial relationship between single features, which vary in their absolute position within an array (Antell, Caron, & Myers, 1985). Also, newborns are able to group separate sets of elements according to Gestalt principles (Farroni et al, 2000), and they find configural and global cues in hierarchical patterns more easily detectable than featural and local information (Macchi Cassia, Simion, Milani, & Umiltà, 2002).…”