Neural Mechanisms of Preferential-looking

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Description (provided by applicant): Preferential-looking paradigms rely on an infant's inherent "preference" for viewing novel stimuli (i.e., novelty preferences) to provide evidence for memory or discrimination. Our long-term goal is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying performance on preferential-looking tasks in order to advance our knowledge about the functional neurobiology and development of visual attention and memory. Such knowledge has important implications for understanding cognitive development in general, and will ultimately help to inform our understanding of how disruptions in the development of these systems may give rise to developmental disorders. The specific hypothesis behind the proposed research is that preferential-looking primarily reflects the incidental encoding of the visual scene into a perceptual store vs. the recollection or recognition of information. The specific aims of this proposal are to: 1. Investigate whether novelty and familiarity preferences are associated with the same or different cognitive processes. The processes underlying novelty and familiarity preferences will be investigated by examining he relation between preferential-looking in the visual-paired comparison (VPC) and subsequent processing of the familiar stimulus via ERPs. Differences in the topography of ERP components can be inferred to reflect differences in the underlying neural circuits, and hence cognitive processes. 2. Dissociate processes related to recognition vs. priming. This will be accomplished by examining the relation between novelty preferences in the VPC and subsequent ERP differences during the processing of familiar and novel stimuli. 3. Dissociate processes related to familiarity vs. recency. This will be accomplished by investigating the effects of repetition of novel and familiar stimuli on ERPs in 6-month olds, focusing in particular on components that have been related to performance on preferential-looking tasks in previous work.