Young Infants' Perception of Partly Occluded Objects

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The function of vision is to provide information to the observer in orderto facilitate subsequent action on the environment. Accurate perceptionentails discernment of the boundaries, coherence, and unity of objects.This process is challenged by the fact that many objects are partlyoccluded by other, nearer objects. Successful object completion underconditions of partial occlusion resides in the appropriate attention to andutilization of several sources of visual information, such as theluminance, color, texture, motion, and depth of visible surfaces. Acomplete account of object perception must include studies of itsdevelopment, and recent research has contributed important information toour knowledge in this area. Interestingly, at birth infants seem torespond to a partly occluded object as if it consists of two disjointsurfaces, even if it provides a clear percept of unity to adults. By 2months of age, in contrast, infants have been found to perceive objectunity under some circumstances, and this skill improves over the followingmonths. Thus humans are not born with the ability to perceive objectunity, but it develops very rapidly over the first few months. At presentthere are disagreements among researchers with respect to the mechanisms ofdevelopment of perception of object unity. For example, young infants havebeen claimed to rely exclusively on motion, and not other cues such assurface appearance, to disambiguate visual scenes involving partialocclusion. Other approaches invoke "core principles" that guide objectperception from birth, such that the perceptual experience of bounded,segregated objects is shared by all human observers, even very younginfants. Recent research, however, provides evidence against both theseviews: Young infants, like adults, appear to rely on several sources ofvisual information in object perception tasks, including motion as well assurface orientation, color, texture, and depth. On this account, thedevelopment of veridical responses to objects proceeds via improvements inthe utilization of all these cues. Despite this advance in theoreticalapproaches to the development of object perception, important questionsremain. The present research will investigate issues surrounding how infantsrespond to the depth and segregation of objects in their environment. The goal is to further elucidate the constraints that guide this fundamental perceptual skill in the first few months after birth. This will be accomplished by testingthe role of specific visual cues in young infants' perception of object unity, aswell as explorations of young infants' visual scanning of object displays, to chartdevelopmental changes in attention to visual cues.