Movement perception and identity constancy in the new‐born baby

Abstract

Five experiments using the visual preference method (Expt 1) and an infant‐controlled habituation procedure (Expts 2–5) are described. Their aim was to examine the salience of movement, both rotation and translation, as a stimulus for new‐borns, and to investigate under what conditions information about shape can be extracted from stationary and moving stimuli. A moving stimulus, whether rotating or translating, was found to be consistently preferred to an identical stationary stimulus (Expt 1). Following habituation to one direction of rotation, no novelty preferences were found for the other direction of rotation (Expt 2); this suggests that clockwise and anticlockwise movements may be comparable for the new‐born.The other experiments suggest that new‐borns can extract shape information from stationary and moving stimuli, and can transfer what is learned to moving and to stationary stimuli (Expts 3 and 5). This transfer occurred when (a) the spatiotemporal changes caused by stimulus rotation were the same from habituation to post‐criterion trials (Expt 3), and (b) orientation did not change (due to the use of translation movement) across conditions (Expt 5). There was no evidence that new‐borns could transfer learning from stationary to rotating stimuli or vice versa (Expt 4).This demonstrates that new‐borns can perceive a similarity between a stimulus when moving and when stationary, and suggests a degree of visual organization that is not usually attributed to the new‐born: Expt 5 in particular suggests that the perceptual potential for identity constancy is present from birth.