Individual differences in infants' duration of fixations to visual stimuli is a reliable and stable measure of attention that correlates with concurrent measures of learning, memory, and discrimination. Furthermore, this measure has been shown to be predictive of later intelligence during childhood; infants with longer patterns of fixation typically score lower on subsequent standardized tests of language, achievement, and intellectual status. The precise mechanism responsible for this prediction is currently unknown. Data indicate that long looking infants' performance deficits may be attributable to slower information processing, but once again, the mechanisms that underlie these differences in speed are uncertain. The present application tests the possibility that the reason why long lookers are slower in the processing of information than short lookers is that they use different strategies for visual intake. Seven experiments are proposed with 3- and 4-month-old human infants that are designed to determine whether short looking infants process in a mature and efficient global-to-local (i.e., overall-to-detail) analysis of visual information, while long looking infants process in a less efficient and more laborious local visual analysis (i.e., visual stimuli processed from the levels of their detail). Such differences would-account for differences observed in apparent processing speed of the two groups. Furthermore,. local visual analysis is an effortful and disadvantageous method for visual intake and would put individuals who use it at risk for later cognitive deficits, including those observed in poor readers. The present set of studies examines this hypothesis by testing long and short lookers' responses to global and local visual information in the following cognitive dimensions: sensitivity, dominance, long-term memory, generalization, and abstraction from symmetrical and partially degraded stimuli. In addition to studying the proposed global-local hypothesis, the studies are also designed to investigate simple quantitative differences between these two groups of infants.
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