Scientists shed new light on speed of infan...( d by an occluding box. Using a special...),Health

d by an occluding box. Using a special camera that records eye movements from the center of the pupil and the cornea, data were gathered through an infrared signal tracking the various positions of the eye as the infant observed the moving ball in various stages. Of central interest was whether the infant anticipated the ball's emergence from behind the occluder, as if she had represented the ball's continued existence despite being out of sight.

The experiment showed that infants who were exposed to the unobscured trajectory were better able to learn to anticipate the movement of the ball when it was later obscured than infants who had not been shown the unobscured trajectory. The team also found that babies who were six months of age had already grasped the fundamentals of object concepts, suggesting that they had learned such representations from real-world experience viewing objects.

"Another implication of our findings is that infants do not necessarily benefit from stimulating toys or exercises; most babies will grasp these concepts quickly through visual observation, rather than manual object manipulation" Johnson added.

The experiment marks the most sophisticated and sensitive research conducted to date of infant learning through eye movements, and the findings mark a shift from the nativist supposition which believed learning of object concepts to be innate back to the developmental theories famously espoused by Piaget in the 1930s. Going forward, Johnson and his colleagues will build on these results by using event-related potentials to measure activity in the brain while the infants are learning in real time.

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Contact: Shonna Keogan
shonna.keogan@nyu.edu
212-998-6797
New York University
25-Aug-2003

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