title: Four-month-old infants' visual investigation of cats and dogs: relations with pet experience and attentional strategy.
abstract: We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants without pet experience, both directing more visual attention to the informative head regions of the animals, particularly when comparing stimuli, and maintaining their attention to an individual animal, resisting the pull on their attention by the other visible animal. Individual differences in general attentional strategies as assessed during a pretest had similar but weaker relations to visual scanning patterns. There was some evidence that the 2 factors were interactively associated with visual inspection, supporting the findings of Kovack-Lesh and colleagues (Kovack-Lesh, Horst, & Oakes, 2008; Kovack-Lesh, Oakes, & McMurray, 2012) that infants' learning about and memory for this type of stimuli is jointly determined by pet experience and attentional style.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ripon College.
authors.forename: Kristine A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Kovack-Lesh
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and the Delta Center, The University of Iowa.
authors.forename: Bob
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: McMurray
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain, University of California.
authors.forename: Lisa M
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6701-2853
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Oakes
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002415:Cats; D004285:Dogs; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D007206:Individuality; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D057805:Pets; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013997:Time Factors