Abstract
The current study examined the temporal dynamics of coarse and fine spatial information processing in 7- to 8-month-old infants. The ability to discriminate between spatially filtered images was assessed by measuring infants' spontaneous preference for a changing over no-changing image sequences. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that infants were able to discriminate between low spatial frequency (LSF) image sequences at shorter durations (150 ms) than was the case with high spatial frequency (HSF) images (300 ms). When the LSF and HSF changes were pitted against each other in hybrid images containing both spatial frequencies (Experiment 3), the 7- to 8-month-old infants showed a preference for the LSF change across all tested durations (150 ms to 600 ms). However, infants' processing of hybrid image sequences was modulated both by changes in the relative contrast energy between LSFs and HSFs (Experiment 4), and image duration (Experiment 5). Finally, we found that in 12- to 13-month-old infants, the shift toward HSF dominance occurred at shorter duration than in 7- to 8-month-old infants (Experiment 6). Our findings are among the first to provide a temporal characterization of coarse-to-fine processing in infants' perception. Possible links to the development of specialized visual pathways are discussed.
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