Early Attention to Animacy: Change-Detection in 11-Month-Olds

Adults are faster and more accurate at detecting changes to animate compared to inanimate stimuli in a change-detection paradigm. We tested whether 11-month-old children detected changes to animate objects in an image more reliably than they detected changes to inanimate objects. During each trial,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolutionary Psychology
Main Authors: Ruth Hofrichter, Hasan Siddiqui, Marcus N. Morrisey, M. D. Rutherford
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2021-06-01
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/14747049211028220
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Summary:Adults are faster and more accurate at detecting changes to animate compared to inanimate stimuli in a change-detection paradigm. We tested whether 11-month-old children detected changes to animate objects in an image more reliably than they detected changes to inanimate objects. During each trial, infants were habituated to an image of a natural scene. Once the infant habituated, the scene was replaced by a scene that was identical except that a target object was removed. Infants dishabituated significantly more often if an animate target had been removed from the scene. Dishabituation results suggested that infants, like adults, preferentially attend to animate rather than to inanimate objects.
ISSN:1474-7049