Work

Experience and Distribution of Attention: Pet Exposure and Infants’ Scanning of Animal Images

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: Although infants’ cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants’ visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants’ eye movements as they visually investigated a series of images. Infants with pet experience (N = 27) directed a greater proportion of their looking at the most informative region of animal stimuli—the head—compared with infants without such experience (N = 21); the two groups of infants did not differ in their scanning of images of human faces or vehicles. Thus, infants’ visual cognitions are influenced by everyday experience, and theories of cognitive development in infancy must account for the effect of experience on development.

Source: Journal of Cognition and Development

DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2013.833922

Authors: Karinna B. Hurley, Lisa M. Oakes

Institutions: University of California System, University of California, Davis

Language: English

Topic: Child and Animal Learning Development

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Award: The development of object representation in infancy