Picture Perception in Infants: Generalization From Two-Dimensional to Three-Dimensional Displays

Abstract

Two experiments investigated 9-month-old infants' abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three-dimensional (3D) object and its twodimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1, infants habituated to a line drawing of either a doll or a sheep and were then tested with the actual objects themselves. Infants habituated to the sheep drawing recovered to the unfamiliar but not the familiar object, showing a novelty preference. Infants habituated to the doll drawing, however, recovered to both familiar and unfamiliar objects, failing to show any preference between the two. In Experiment 2, infants habituated to the 3D objects and were then tested with the 2D line drawings. In this case, both groups of infants showed a preference only for the novel displays. Together these findings demonstrate that 9-month-old infants recognize the correspondence between 3D objects and their 2D representations, even when these representations are not literal copies of the objects themselves.The ability to perceive two-dimensional (2D) representations of threedimensional (3D) visual arrays is an essential part of our lives. Typically, perceivers are asked to make use of information contained in many 2D representations, including literal representations (e.g., photographs), Correspondence should be sent to

Picturing Objects in Infancy

“…In one condition, we tested object recognition by keeping both objects visible. We predicted infants would reach more for the distractor, in keeping with findings from visual recognition memory studies (e.g., Jowkar‐Baniani & Schmuckler, ). A novelty preference with visible objects would suggest infants identify the target object as familiar from their exposure to its photograph, and are less interested in exploring it than the unfamiliar distractor object.…”

“…Even then, toddlers are more likely to demonstrate transfer with increasing age and with more iconic pictures (e.g., Ganea et al, 2008;Simcock & DeLoache, 2006). To date, only one study has shown transfer from pictures to objects in the 1st year of life, using visual habituation with 9-montholds (Jowkar-Baniani & Schmuckler, 2011). However, those infants were less likely to show visual recognition memory in the picture-to-object condition than the object-to-picture condition, consistent with the literature suggesting that representations constructed from pictures are weaker than those constructed from objects (e.g., Carver et al, 2006;Mash & Bornstein, 2012).…”

Pupil Dilation and Object Permanence in Infants

“…3 3 There is reasonable evidence that 2D representations of events (video stimuli) are comparable with actual, live, real‐life 3D events with regard to infants’ perception of their content (Johnson & Náñez, 1995; Jowkar‐Baniani & Schmuckler, 2011). The role of interposition and perspective indices in a 2D adaptation of the drawbridge experiment was explicitly investigated by Durand and Lécuyer (2002), who were able to replicate findings obtained from “live” stimuli such as used by Baillargeon et al.…”

Haptic exploration of depicted and real objects by 9‐month‐old infants

“…Prior studies demonstrated that 9-month-olds can differentiate between depicted (2D) and real (3D) objects, and they typically reach for the actual 3D display when given a choice to do so (DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, & Gottlieb, 1998;DeLoache, Strauss, & Maynard, 1979). Infants in this age group also appear to recognize the correspondence between 2D and 3D displays that confirms picture-to-object transfer across displays of the same or highly similar objects (Jowkar-Baniani & Schmuckler, 2011;Shinskey & Jachens, 2014).…”