Psychology Study Offers New Insights Into Visual Ability of Infants

By James Devitt

Four-month old infants are able to discriminate between pictures of structurally possible and impossible objects, according to a study by lead researcher Sarah M. Shuwairi, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology. The findings, which are the first to demonstrate this level of visual sophistication in infants, recently appeared in the journal Psychological Science.

In the study, four-month-old infants viewed a series of two-dimensional images of three-dimensional drawings: one set of structurally possible images (e.g., a three-dimensional box) and another set of structurally impossible images (e.g., a three-dimensional box whose construction would not be viable in reality—see images at right). The goal of the research was to determine whether four-month-olds could recognize the inconsistencies in the three-dimensional information provided in a two-dimensional image.

In three separate experiments, the infants looked significantly longer at impossible figures, which revealed that four-month-olds discriminate between possible and impossible cubes, and that this ability does not depend on prior experience with such images.

“Our finding of a preference for the impossible images suggests that young infants are sensitive to at least some pictorial information present in two-dimensional images and depictions of three-dimensional objects,” Shuwairi concluded. “In early infancy, the visual system is capable of using the appropriate visual cues from a two-dimensional depiction in order to make a geometrically consistent interpretation of an object and can detect spatial inconsistencies in illustrated images.

“Early in postnatal development, the human visual system appears to be equipped with mechanisms for detecting perceptual cues that facilitate processing information about depth and spatial relations among parts of objects,” she added. “These findings provide important insights into the development of mechanisms for processing pictorial depth cues that allow adults to extract three-dimensional structure from pictures of objects.”