Global and local processing by 3- and 4-month-old infants

Abstract

In two experiments with 3- and 4-month-old infants, we used a familiarization/novelty preference procedure to assess the ability of infants to acquire information about the global and local information in a complex visual pattern. The initial experiment established that individual infants were able to acquire and remember information about both the global forms and the local forms from which the global patterns were constructed. In addition, we found that the global and local forms were of nearly equal discriminability. Using these patterns and a Stroop-like interference paradigm, in the second experiment we obtained evidence for a global precedence effect that could not, we argue, be attributed solely to a difference in discriminability favoring the global stimuli. © 1988 Psychonomic Society, Inc.