The Role of Perceptual Skills in Newborns' Perception of Partly Occluded Objects

This study explored whether the reported inability of newborns to perceive object unity could result from the limited abilities of newborns to recognize the correspondence between 2 stimuli that were identical except for the presence or absence of an occluder. Five experiments were carried out using a visual habituation technique. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that newborns were capable of recognizing the perceptual correspondence between a nonoccluded and an occluded form. More intriguing, the outcomes of Experiments 2, 3, and 4 suggested that newborns find a partly occluded form to be more similar to a completely unoccluded form than to an unoccluded form containing a gap. Finally, even if newborns are able to perceive the correspondence between a partly occluded object and a complete form, the presence of this skill does not appear sufficient to imply the ability to manifest veridical object unity perception at birth (Experiment 5)

Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Habituation · Perception · Visual perception · Child and Animal Learning Development · Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills · Communication · Neuroscience · Psychology · Tactile and Sensory Interactions · Artificial Intelligence

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  Open Access•PHILIP J KELLMAN, Elizabeth S Spelke•Cognitive Psychology•1983

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• Newborns' Perceptual Categorization for Closed and Open Geometric Forms

  Open Access•Chiara Turati, Francesca Simion et al.•Infancy•2003

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  Frances Degen Horowitz, Lucile Paden et al.•Developmental Psychology•1972

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• Perception of object unity in 2-month-old infants

  Scott P Johnson, Richard N Aslin et al.•Developmental Psychology•1995

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