title: Configural processing at birth: evidence for perceptual organisation.
abstract: We report a series of ten experiments aimed to investigate the newborn's ability to discriminate the components of a visual pattern and to process the visual information that specifies the global configuration of a stimulus. The results reveal that: (i) newborn babies are able to distinguish individual elements of a stimulus (experiments 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D); (ii) they can group individual elements into a holistic percept on the basis of Gestalt principles (experiments 2A and 3A); (iii) their spontaneous preferences cannot be easily modified by habituation (experiments 2B and 3B); and (iv) when horizontal stimuli are paired with vertical stimuli, they prefer the horizontal ones (experiments 4A and 4B).
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Padua, Italy. farroni@ux1.unipd.it
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Farroni
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Valenza
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Simion
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Umiltà
mesh_terms: D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn / Q000523:psychology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010466:Perceptual Closure; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods