title: The development of depth perception from motion parallax in infancy.
abstract: Little is known about infants' perception of depth from motion parallax, even though it is known that infants are sensitive both to motion and to depth-from-motion cues at an early age. The present experiment assesses whether infants are sensitive to the unambiguous depth specified by motion parallax and, if so, when this sensitivity first develops. Eleven infants were followed longitudinally from 8 to 29 weeks. Infants monocularly viewed a translating Rogers and Graham (1979) random-dot stimulus, which appears as a corrugated surface to adult observers. Using the infant-control habituation paradigm, looking time was recorded for each 10-sec trial until habituation, followed by two test trials: one using a depth-reversed and one using a flat stimulus. Dishabituation results indicate that infants may be sensitive to unambiguous depth from motion parallax by 16 weeks of age. Implications for the developmental sequence of depth from motion, stereopsis, and eye movements are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Minnesota State University, Moorhead, Minnesota 56563, USA. nawrot@mnstate.edu
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Nawrot
authors.forename: Sherryse L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Mayo
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nawrot
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D003867:Depth Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D002666:Psychology, Child; D015348:Vision, Binocular