Configural processing at birth: Evidence for perceptual organisation

We report a series of ten experiments aimed to investigate the newborn's ab ility to discriminate the components of a visual pattern and to process the visual information that specifies the global configuration of a stimulus. The results reveal that: (i) newborn babies are able to distinguish individ ual elements of a stimulus (experiments 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D); (ii) they can group individual elements into a holistic percept on the basis of Gestalt p rinciples (experiments 2A and 3A); (iii) their spontaneous preferences cann ot be easily modified by habituation (experiments 2B and 3B); and (iv) when horizontal stimuli are paired with vertical stimuli, they prefer the horiz ontal ones (experiments 4A and 4B).