The Ability to See Solid Form in Early Infancy

Abstract

The perception of three-dimensional attributes of solid objects by twelve-week-old infants was studied. In the first experiment the rates of habituation of fixation to a cube in a fixed orientation, to one which changed in orientation between presentations, and to a sequence of photographs of cubes in different orientations were determined. Habituation rate was also determined for a photograph of a cube in a fixed orientation. No difference was found between the initial fixation times for solids and photographs, or between the habituation curves for the solids in fixed and varying orientation. For the photographs habituation was much greater for the fixed orientation than the varying orientation condition. These data were interpreted as providing strong evidence that the infants were responding to the stimuli on the basis of their three-dimensional attributes. In the second experiment the same discriminations were examined by a recovery-from-habituation technique. One group was habituated to a cube in a fixed orientation and tested for recovery of fixation to a new orientation. A second group was habituated to a photograph of a cube in a single orientation and tested for recovery to a photograph of a new orientation. Both groups showed recovery and the recovery was the same for both conditions. These data demonstrated that the subjects were, after all, capable of discriminating between different orientations of a solid cube, and they provided no further evidence that the infants were perceiving three-dimensional attributes of the stimuli.