title: Time crawls: the temporal resolution of infants' visual attention.
abstract: Conscious visual perception of the constantly changing environment is one of the brain's most critical functions. In virtually every moment of every daily activity, the visual system is confronted with the task of accurately representing and interpreting scenes that change rapidly over time. Adults can judge the identity and order of changing images presented at a rate of up to 10 Hz (~50 ms per image); this limit reflects a finite temporal resolution of attention. In the research reported here, although 6- to 15-month-old infants could detect the presence of rapid flicker without difficulty, their ability to segment individual alternating states within the flicker was severely limited: Fifteen-month-old infants had a temporal resolution of attention approximately one order of magnitude lower than that of adults (~1 Hz). Coarse temporal resolution constrains how infants perceive and utilize dynamic visual information and may play a role in the visual processing deficits found in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. ffarzin@stanford.edu
authors.forename: Faraz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Farzin
authors.forename: Susan M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Rivera
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Whitney
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D002666:Psychology, Child; D013997:Time Factors; D013998:Time Perception; D014796:Visual Perception