SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ASPECTS OF INFANT COLOR-VISION

The present paper constitutes a review of the literature on young infa nts' chromatic discrimination capabilities. A series of early studies showed that infants as young as two months postnatal can make at least some chromatic discriminations between stationary, homogeneous fields of different wavelength compositions. Current studies of spatial and temporal contrast sensitivity functions (CSFs) for red/green isolumina nt stimuli suggest that spatial chromatic CSFs show developmental chan ges in sensitivity and spatial scale, but not curve shape; while tempo ral chromatic CSFs (tCSFs) show developmental changes in sensitivity a nd curve shape, but not temporal scale. Infants can also code the dire ction of motion of moving isoluminant red/green gratings, for both con tinuous and quadrature motion. The possible mechanisms that underlie i nfants' chromatic discriminations are discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sci ence Ltd. All rights reserved.