Directionality distinguishes pictures from their referents in 7-9 months old infants

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Nikolaus F. Troje¹ (troje@yorku.ca), Lucie Preißler², Gudrun Schwarzer²; ¹York University, ²Justus-Liebig-University Giessen

Seven-month-old infants discriminate between pictures of objects and their referents as has been shown with habituation-dishabituation experiments and also manifests as preferential looking at real objects. Gerhard et al. (2016) presented infants with both a toy and a picture of that same toy. Both during first presentation and after habituation, infants preferred to look at the real objects. What are the visual cues infants use for that discrimination? Motivated by research on adult observers that demonstrate the significance of motion parallax over other depth cues to achieve a sense of presence and place (Wang & Troje, 2023), we tested the hypothesis that motion parallax alone is sufficient to cause preferential looking in infants. Using the same toys as employed by Gerhard et al. we tested three groups of 20 seven-to-eight-months-old infants. Stimulus pairs represented the three possible combinations of the following three displays types: (a) the real 3D toy; (b) a realistic picture of the same toy presented on a 13” iPad screen; (c) the same rendering displayed using MPDepth, a technique that adds depth-from-motion-parallax to a picture (Troje, 2023). Infants who had the choice between (a) and (b) looked longer at (a) (57% vs. 43%, p<0.01). Infants who compared (b) and (c) preferred (c) (52% vs 48%, p<0.05). Those who compared (a) and (c) did not show a significant preference (51% vs 49%, n.s.). As hypothesized, the introduction of motion parallax alone is sufficient to generate a preference that is comparable to the real-object advantage.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Development & aging