Abstract
The present study examined 7- and 9-month-old infants’ visual habituation to real objects and pictures of the same objects and their preferences between real and pictorial versions of the same objects following habituation. Different hypotheses would predict that infants may habituate faster to pictures than real objects (based on proposed theoretical links between behavioral habituation in infants and neuroimaging adaptation in adults) or to real objects vs. pictures (based on past infant electrophysiology data). Sixty-one 7-month-old infants and fifty-nine 9-month-old infants were habituated to either a real object or a picture of the same object and afterward preference tested with the habituation object paired with either the novel real object or its picture counterpart. Infants of both age groups showed basic information-processing advantages for real objects. Specifically, during the initial presentations, 9-month-old infants looked longer at stimuli in both formats than the 7-month olds but more importantly both age groups looked longer at real objects than pictures, though with repeated presentations, they habituated faster for real objects such that at the end of habituation, they looked equally at both types of stimuli. Surprisingly, even after habituation, infants preferred to look at the real objects, regardless of whether they had habituated to photos or real objects. Our findings suggest that from as early as 7-months of age, infants show strong preferences for real objects, perhaps because real objects are visually richer and/or enable the potential for genuine interactions.
Highlights
Recent research on human object perception and recognition has increasingly questioned the ecological validity of using pictures of objects as a proxy for real objects (Snow et al, 2011, 2014)
Real objects differ from pictures, even perfectly matched photos, in many attributes including the availability of binocular depth cues and motion-based depth cues, consistency between binocular and monocular depth cues, and the potential to act upon the objects
Infants spent more time looking at real objects than pictures initially; over the course of habituation, the looking times for real objects dropped at a faster rate than for pictures until they were similar between the two formats
Summary
Recent research on human object perception and recognition has increasingly questioned the ecological validity of using pictures of objects (such as photos or line drawings) as a proxy for real objects (Snow et al, 2011, 2014). Bushong et al (2010), for example, found that participants in a neuroeconomics study were willing to pay about 50% more when bidding on items (food or trinkets) presented as real objects vs photographs or text labels. They found that placing a large transparent (Plexiglas) barrier between the participants and stimuli eliminated the effect, suggesting that valuation was not driven by low-level visual features such as binocular disparity, which did not change with the barrier, but rather by the accessibility of the food. Results showed that for both episodic memory measures subjects’ performance was superior for real objects compared to color photographs and line drawings
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