4-MONTH-OLDS RECOGNITION OF COMPLEMENTARY-CONTOUR FORMS

Four-month-old long- and short-looking infants were habituated to a vi sual form from which 50% of the contour was removed. Infants were then tested for recognition of the visual form with paired comparison tria ls in which two other 50%-degraded visual forms were simultaneously pr esented. One of the two degraded forms presented in the test trials wa s a novel form, and the other form was comprised of the ''complementar y contour'' (i.e., the contour not previously shown) of the degraded h abituation stimulus. Thus, the task involved a test of infants' recogn ition of a form across stimuli that shared no common contour. Only inf ants with attentional profiles characterized by shorter fixation durat ions recognized forms when tested in this way. These results suggest t hat some infants are in fact capable of generalizing from one compleme ntary image to another; the observation of this ability in only short- looking infants is consistent with previous suggestions of differences in visual encoding as a function of individual differences in fixatio n duration.