ATTENTION, RECOGNITION, AND THE EFFECTS OF STIMULUS CONTEXT IN 6-MONTH-OLD INFANTS

Four experiments were conducted using stimuli that included a central stimulus cue and a background context pattern. At issue was how attent ion, encoding, and recognition are affected when these stimulus compon ents are manipulated within habituation, familiarization, and recognit ion procedures. Results indicate that infants attend to and encode bot h stimulus components (cue, context pattern), and that these component s are encoded interactively. That is, infants encode cue information i n relation to the context (setting) in which it is experienced. Result s also indicate that recognition is context dependent under some exper imental conditions, with successful recognition exhibited only when en coding and retrieval contexts are identical. Nevertheless, factors tha t influence the deployment of attention to context patterns also deter mine whether cue recognition is context dependent or not. Results were discussed in terms of the importance of attentional processes in infa nts' monitoring of the visual world and in terms of theoretical issues related to attentional deployment in infants.