Object recognition and attention to object components by preschool children and 4-month-old infants

The present research investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli by infants and preschool children. A preliminary experiment was conducted with adults to develop stimulus components and to validate their structure. An experiment using an oddity task with preschoolers (N = 32) and one using the familiarization/novelty-preference task with infants (N = 64) demonstrated successful discrimination among the stimulus components on the basis of edge property information. Separate experiments using a matching task with preschoolers (N = 32) and an habituation task with infants (N = 32) demonstrated that preschoolers and infants are also able to direct attention to and recognize components of compound stimuli. Implications for structural-description theories of object recognition are discussed.