The twelve proposed experiments will enable a better understanding of how infants parse their surroundings into discrete objects, determining which regions of the visual array go together to make up unified objects and which do not. Much previous research has been dedicated to this topic, but nearly all of it has relied exclusively on measures of attentive looking time behaviors and the method of habituation/dishabituation. A new method of assessment, based on reaching behaviors, is employed for the proposed studies. Young infants tend to reach for the outer boundaries of one object at a time. By examining how infants reach for a target display it is thus possible to assess how they have visually parsed the display into discrete, graspable units. By systematically varying the presence of specific Gestalt cues to connectedness in the target display, the proposed experiments will determine which cues mediate this object-directed reaching behavior at different ages. Habituation/dishabituation studies will be conducted using identical displays and viewing conditions in order to allow a direct comparison of the two measures of Gestalt perception. To the extent that the results obtained with the new reaching method match those obtained with the looking time measure, the proposed experiments will provide converging evidence for task-general properties of human perceptual development. To the extent that the two measures invoke the use of different sources of Gestalt information, the experiments will suggest that reaching and attentive looking behaviors are mediated by two distinct, task- specific processes of object perception and/or two distinct, task-specific structures of underlying knowledge. Consideration of these differences will enable a better understanding of how perception and action processes interact in early infancy. Habituation/dishabituation studies have provided a wealth of compelling, detailed knowledge about infants' processes of object perception. Do the processes revealed by looking time studies mediate all behaviors or only looking time behaviors? By conducting reaching and looking time studies with the same displays, presented under the same viewing conditions, and assessing the object perception processes that mediate reaching and looking, this critical theoretical question can be addressed.
| Vishton, Peter M; Stephens, Nicolette J; Nelson, Lauren A et al. (2007) Planning to reach for an object changes how the reacher perceives it. Psychol Sci 18:713-9 |
| Vishton, Peter M; Ware, Elizabeth A; Badger, Amy N (2005) Different Gestalt processing for different actions? Comparing object-directed reaching and looking time measures. J Exp Child Psychol 90:89-113 |
