When a person looks at a visual stimulus, all the information in the scene is not taken in in one glance. Rather, the person scans the visual scene in a series of "snapshots" (individual pauses or fixations of the eye), while sequentially collecting the information from which the brain constructs a unified experience of the world. How this scanning takes place depends, to some extent, on what the person already knows, and how sophisticated the person is cognitively. But how does a baby, whose visual system is immature and who has neither extensive experience in the world nor highly developed mental abilities, scan the world? Can the way in which babies look at visual stimuli be used as a way to understand their mental processes? This research will explore the relationship between visual scanning and information processing during infancy. Babies will be shown one pattern repeatedly, until their interest in this stimulus wanes (a process called "habituation"). Each baby's pattern of scanning eye movements and fixations during the habituation process will be recorded using specialized television equipment. The baby will then be shown a new pattern, different from the first. Usually, if the new pattern is distinctive enough, the baby's attention to the new stimulus increases again, in a process termed "dishabituation". This research will examine the details of visual scanning during habituation and dishabituation to see whether differences in scanning across phases of the experiment reveal the expectations that the babies have developed about what they are looking at. The results of the research will contribute to our knowledge of how babies learn about the world around them.
