title: Three-month-olds' sensitivity to orientation cues in the three-dimensional depth plane.
abstract: Three-month-olds are sensitive to orientation changes of line drawings when they have a three-dimensional (3-D) interpretation and when the changes are defined by both 3-D depth and two-dimensional (2-D) picture plane cues [Bhatt, R. S., & Bertin, E. (2001). Pictorial cues and three-dimensional information processing in early infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 315-332]. In the current study, we examined whether 3-month-olds are sensitive to pictorial line junction cues that signal orientation changes solely in the 3-D depth plane. The results revealed that infants discriminated a misoriented elongated cube in an array when the stimuli contained both shading and lines (Experiment 2) but not when only lines depicted the elongated cubes (Experiment 1). Testing with comparable 2-D images revealed that, even in the presence of shading information, detection of orientation changes is specific to images that have a 3-D interpretation. Together, the results suggest that 3-month-olds are sensitive to pictorial line junction cues that signal orientation changes in the 3-D depth plane to adults provided that shading information is available and the images have a 3-D interpretation.
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Cultural Ontogeny, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. ebertin@eva.mpg.de
authors.forename: Evelin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bertin
authors.forename: Ramesh S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Bhatt
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception; D013037:Spatial Behavior