Kaldy Zsuzsa, Blaser Erik
University of Massachusetts Boston, Department of Psychology, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02118.
Infancy. 2009 Mar;14(2):222-243. doi: 10.1080/15250000802707088.
What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g. shape or color) more than others (e. g. luminance), can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, since the magnitude of feature values - how noticeable and interesting they are - will affect results. We employed a novel methodology, 'Interdimensional Salience Mapping', that allowed us to quantify and calibrate salience changes along shape, luminance and color feature dimensions. We then compared 9-month-old infants' identification of objects, employing feature changes that were equally salient. These results show that infants more readily identify objects on the basis of color and shape than luminance. Additionally, we show that relative salience changes rapidly in infancy - in particular, we found significantly higher salience thresholds for color in younger (6.5-month-old) infants - but that individual differences within an age group are remarkably modest.
婴儿在试图识别之前见过的物体时会依赖什么样的特征信息呢？只有在视觉显著性得到控制的情况下，才能合理地研究婴儿是否更多地使用某些特征（如形状或颜色）而非其他特征（如亮度），因为特征值的大小——它们有多显著和有趣——会影响结果。我们采用了一种新颖的方法，即“维度间显著性映射”，它使我们能够量化和校准沿形状、亮度和颜色特征维度的显著性变化。然后，我们比较了9个月大婴儿对物体的识别情况，采用了同样显著的特征变化。这些结果表明，婴儿基于颜色和形状识别物体比基于亮度更容易。此外，我们还表明，相对显著性在婴儿期变化迅速——特别是，我们发现年龄较小（6.5个月大）的婴儿对颜色的显著性阈值明显更高——但同一年龄组内的个体差异非常小。
