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    No two cues are alike: depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention

    Wu, Rachel and Kirkham, Natasha Z. (2010) No two cues are alike: depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 107 (2), pp. 118-136. ISSN 0022-0965.

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    Abstract

    Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment I used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds' attention to two audiovisual events (i.e., animations of a cat or dog accompanied by particular sounds) while identical distractor events played in another location. Experiment 2 directed 8-month-olds' attention with colorful flashes to the same events. Experiment 3 measured baseline learning without attention cues both with the familiarization and test trials (no cue condition) and with only the test trials (test control condition). The 8-month-olds exposed to social cues showed specific learning of audiovisual events. The 4-month-olds displayed only general spatial learning from social cues, suggesting that specific learning of audiovisual events from social cues may be a function of experience. Infants cued with the colorful flashes looked indiscriminately to both cued locations during test (similar to the 4-month-olds learning from social cues) despite attending for equal duration to the training trials as the 8-month-olds with the social cues. Results from Experiment 3 indicated that the learning effects in Experiments 1 and 2 resulted from exposure to the different cues and multimodal events. We discuss these findings in terms of the perceptual differences and relevance of the cues. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): visual attention, spatial cueing, infancy, learning, multimodal perception, eye-tracking, joint visual attention Multimodal perception Eye-tracking Joint visual attention
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Natasha Kirkham
    Date Deposited: 03 Jan 2013 12:23
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:00
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5781

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