The roles of perceptual and categorical similarity in colour pop-out in infants

For both adults and infants, whether a unique target pops out from a backgr ound of distracters and captures attention depends on the perceived target- distractor similarity. For adults, this similarity can be categorical as we ll as perceptual, but whether the same is true for infants is unknown. Here , the authors examined whether infants' colour pop-out is affected by categ orical target-distractor similarity using target-distractor pairs in Munsel l (R) colours from either the same or a different category and representing different degrees of perceptual similarity. It was found that only targets that were perceptually most dissimilar from the distracter colours popped out, irrespective of category membership; target colours more perceptually similar to the distracter colour did not, even if they were from a differen t colour category. Although young infants are known to categorize colours i n an adult-like fashion, whether or not they preattentively detect a unique ly coloured target is determined by a non-categorical, perceptual colour me tric.