Visual Selection and Object Perception

We examined the relation between the emergence of visual selection mechanisms and object perception in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants participated in both a perceptual completion and a visual search task. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently viewed unoccluded broken and complete rod test stimuli. We presented the same infants with visual search displays in which single targets of varying levels of salience were cast among homogeneous static vertical distracters. Infants who provided evidence of a functional visual selective attention mechanism in the search task were the same infants whose posthabituation preference indicated unity perception in the completion task. Index Terms Visual Attention, Infancy, Object Perception, Oculomotor Control.