Infants' perception of curved illusory contour with motion.

Recently, Masuda et al. (submitted for publication) showed that adults perceive moving rigid or nonrigid motion from illusory contour with neon color spreading in which the inducer has pendular motion with or without phase difference. In Experiment 1, we used the preferential looking method to investigate whether 3-8-month-old infants can discriminate illusory and non-illusory contour figures, and found that the 7-8-month-old, but not the 3-6-month-old, infants showed significant preference for illusory contour with phase difference. In Experiment 2, we tested the validity of the visual stimuli in the present study, and whether infants could detect illusory contour from the current neon color spreading figures. The results showed that all infants might detect illusory contour figure with neon color spreading figures. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that 7-8-month-old infants potentially perceive illusory contour from the visual stimulus with phase-different movement of inducers, which elicits the perception of nonrigid dynamic subjective contour in adults.