INFANT VISUAL EXPECTATION IN RELATION TO FEATURE LEARNING

Five-month-old infants were administered a modified version of Haith, Hazan, and Goodman's (1988) visual expectation paradigm. Infants were presented with 60 trials of a left-left-right or right-right-left alte rnating sequence of moving graphic stimuli. An immobile and unchanging visual feature (i.e., a boolean OR or For All) appeared at random loc ations on each of the graphics. Infants then received a series of six test trials in which a novel pair of identical moving stimuli was simu ltaneously presented to the left and night of visual center. The ''fam iliar'' feature (e.g., boolean OR) appeared on one member of the pair and the ''novel'' feature (e.g., For All) appeared on the other member of the pair. Results indicated that infants who engaged in more antic ipatory looking during the 60 familiarization trials attended more to the graphic containing the novel feature during test trials. Results s uggest that 5-month-old infants who are better at learning spatiotempo ral patterns are also better at learning the contents of brief and cha nging graphic displays. It is suggested that the relation between anti cipatory looking and novelty preference is explained by cognitive as w ell as attention-regulatory factors.