The research described in this proposal will continue our examination of developmental changes in infants' visual information-processing. For more than two decades we have been investigating how infants perceive, organize, and understand visual information in their environment. Based upon our findings, as well as those from many other laboratories, we have discovered a number of general information-processing principles that seem to apply repeatedly over the first two years of life. In many respects these principles resemble those that characterize children and adults as they become proficient, or expert, in specific domains. It is just that for infants the domain is the immediate world around them, and during the first two years of life they are becoming proficient in perceiving, predicting, and understanding objects, people, and events in that world. By using experimental designs capitalizing on infant visual habituation, we plan to examine the development of normal infant visual information processing in four specific research areas: the perception of objects, faces, simple causal events, and other more complex events. In each case we will by examining local versus global processing. Specific predictions in each area, based upon our information-processing principles will be tested. We also plan to attempt some computational modeling of the developmental process. The normal developmental progressions we discover can be used as baselines to assess infants with aberrant developmental patterns. In fact, although not a formal part of this proposal, we already have established collaborations with other laboratories and jointly plan to use our discoveries about normal perceptual development to assist in those projects' assessments of infants with spina bifida or with brain lesions in either the left or right hemisphere.
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