Infants’ perception of information along object boundaries: Concavities versus convexities

Race-based perceptual asymmetries underlying face processing in infancy

“…However, our findings are strongly indicative of featural asymmetry in other-race versus own-race faces, because they not only are consistent with Levin's findings, but also are consistent with previous research indicating that featural discrepancies attract infants' attention (e.g., Bhatt, 1997) and that a feature-positive element among feature-negative elements attracts infants' attention but not vice versa (Bhatt et al, 2006).…”

“…In other words, infants' performance was determined by a single pop-out element, rather than by the large number of surrounding elements in the array, thereby indicating attentional engagement by the discrepant element. Subsequent research by Bhatt, Hayden, Reed, Bertin, and Joseph (2006) showed that infants also exhibit asymmetries in discrepancy detection. In that study, infants detected concave elements among convex distractors, but not vice versa.…”

Processing convexity and concavity along a 2-D contour: figure–ground, structural shape, and attention

“…These studies built on previous work that had demonstrated that infants focus their attention on edges and line junctions (e.g., Bhatt & Bertin, 2001;Salapatek, 1968). Bhatt, Hayden, Reed, Bertin, and Joseph (2006) found that 5-and 6-month-old infants detected concave elements amid convex distractors, but not convex elements among concave distractors (but see below for our discussion of this type of search asymmetry). More recently, Hayden, Bhatt, Kangas, and Zieber (2011) habituated 5-month-olds to a silhouette that contained a segment presented either as convex or as concave (i.e., a cavity).…”

Modeling Cross-Cultural Performance on the Visual Oddity Task

“…For example, parallel lines are salient for children as young as three [1]. Adults and infants can distinguish between concave and convex shapes-a qualitative distinction [3], and humans have been shown to have a preference for objects aligned with a vertical or horizontal axis, as opposed to those with an arbitrary orientation [2]. Huttenlocher and colleagues [17] have shown that when individuals memorize a point's location in a circle, they pay special attention to which quadrant of the circle the point lies in, again a qualitative distinction.…”

“…(2) Why is it that, despite the high correlation between population groups, some problems seem especially hard for Americans, while other problems seem especially hard for the Mundurukú? (3) To what extent can questions 1) and 2) be answered in terms of the process of encoding representations, versus the process of operating over those representations to solve problems? This paper presents a cognitive model designed to explore these questions.…”