Because an understanding about the world arises from early visual experiences, the types of visual representations infants form have implications for what infants learn from those experiences and therefore for later conceptual development. Previous research exploring limitations in infants' visual short-term memory VSTM, has uncovered significant developmental changes in how much visually presented information infants can remember. This change in the capacity of VSTM must have a critical impact on how infants learn about the visual world. The proposed experiments seek to untangle the interactive effects of developing attention and VSTM on cognitive development by investigating how what an infant can remember about what he or she sees determines how these stimuli are processed and subsequently remembered. This research will extend previous work by further investigating capacity limitations in VSTM, and how these capacity limitations interact with other processes, such as visual attention, to determine what infants learn about the world. Thus, this project has 3 specific aims: (1) to replicate and extend previous work identifying changes in VSTM capacity over the first year of life (Experiment 1), (2) to explore the relationship between VSTM capacity limitations and how stimuli are processed (Experiment 2), and (3) to demonstrate flexibility in the quality of visual representations by probing the interaction between VSTM and visual attention (Experiments 3 and 4). ? ?
| Ross-Sheehy, Shannon; Perone, Sammy; Vecera, Shaun P et al. (2016) The Relationship between Sitting and the Use of Symmetry As a Cue to Figure-Ground Assignment in 6.5-Month-Old Infants. Front Psychol 7:759 |
| Ross-Sheehy, Shannon; Oakes, Lisa M; Luck, Steven J (2011) Exogenous attention influences visual short-term memory in infants. Dev Sci 14:490-501 |
| Perone, Sammy; Madole, Kelly L; Ross-Sheehy, Shannon et al. (2008) The relation between infants'activity with objects and attention to object appearance. Dev Psychol 44:1242-8 |
