title: Local redundancy governs infants' spontaneous orienting to visual-temporal sequences.
abstract: Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior exposure, infants looked longer at the random sequence. In Experiment 2, 17 infants looked equally long at bigram- and trigram-based sequences. However, an analysis of local redundancy revealed that in both experiments disengagement from the sequences was governed by local repetitions rather than by global sequence statistics. This finding suggests that a spontaneous sensitivity to stimulus complexity helps orient infants to sequences they can learn from.
authors: Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom. c.addyman@bbk.ac.uk
authors: Caspar
authors: C
authors: Addyman
authors: Denis
authors: D
authors: Mareschal
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011897:Random Allocation; D012691:Serial Learning; D013997:Time Factors; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*