1. P ARTS, CAVITIES, AND OBJECT REPRESENTATION IN INFANTS BY : ANGELA HAYDEN, RAMESH S. BHATT, ASHLEY KANGAS AND NICOLE ZIEBER Presented: VICTORIA KHA

2. O BJECTIVE Part perception is very important when studying object recognition, figure – ground assignment, shape similarity, visual search, attention and memory for shapes If parts are fundamental components of object shape representation early in life, then the infant visual system should give priority to parts over other aspects of objects. Are shapes of parts more important to infants than the shapes of cavities? Parts: a portion of the image that juts out of an object. Cavity: concave contour that point into an object.

3. H OW ADULTS PERCEIVE FIGURE AND BACKGROUND When adults view an image they generally designate CONVEX contours as FIGURE, while designating CONCAVE contours as BACKGROUD. Adults are quicker to process the location of parts than the location of cavities. Subjects are 5 month old babies because they are at an age that exhibits an asymmetry in the processing of concavities/convexities.

4. S TIMULI A pattern that contained both a cavity and a part was shown to the babies. The babies were allowed to habituate to the pattern and then they were shown the preference figure.

5. A PPARATUS AND PROCEDURE Babies were placed in front of a computer monitor and shown two habituation pattern until the babies looked away from two seconds or after 60 seconds. Next the babies were shown the test stimuli and their gaze was recorded by a researcher who was unaware of the location of the test stimuli.

6. R ESULTS Taking the time infants looked toward the cavity shape by the total time of looking toward both test patterns and then multiplying by 100 the researchers found that shape of the part was more important than the shape of the cavity.

7. CONCLUSION Although unsure of why parts are more important than cavities it seems like infants process visual information around them in such a way that they prioritize figural over background information.

8. W ORK C ITED Angela Hayden, Ramesh S. Bhatt, Ashley Kangas, Nicole Zieber. (2011). Parts, Cavities, and Object representation in infancy. Journal of experimental psychology: Human perception and performance, 314-317.