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Summary: Developmental Science 9:2 (2006), pp 189206
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
PAPER
Visual pop-out in infants and adults
The eyes have it: visual pop-out in infants and adults
Scott A. Adler and Jazmine Orprecio
Department of Psychology, York University, Canada
Abstract
Visual search studies with adults have shown that stimuli that contain a unique perceptual feature pop out from dissimilar dis-
tractors and are unaffected by the number of distractors. Studies with very young infants have suggested that they too might
exhibit pop-out. However, infant studies have used paradigms in which pop-out is measured in seconds or minutes, whereas in
adults pop-out occurs in milliseconds. In addition, with the previous infant paradigms the effects from higher cognitive processes
such as memory cannot be separated from pop-out and selective attention. Consequently, whether infants exhibit the phenomenon
of pop-out and have selective attention mechanisms as found in adults is not clear. This study was an initial attempt to design
a paradigm that would provide a comparable measure between infants and adults, thereby allowing a more accurate determination
of the developmental course of pop-out and selective attention mechanisms. To this end, we measured 3-month-olds' and adults'
saccade latencies to visual arrays that contained either a + among Ls (target-present) or all Ls (target-absent) with set sizes
of 1, 3, 5 or 8 items. In Experiment 1, infants' saccade latencies remained unchanged in the target-present conditions as set
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