Textons, visual pop-out effects, and object recognition in infancy

Five experiments were conducted to determine whether primitive perceptual features, or textons, which Julesz (1984) identified in studies of texture segregation with adults, also affect object recognition early in development. Three-month-old infants discriminated Ts and Ls composed of overlapping line segments from +s but not from each other in a delayed-recognition test after 24 hr; however, Ts and Ls were discriminated from each other after only 1 hr. In a priming paradigm, Ts, Ls, and +s were discriminated from one another after 2 weeks. In succeeding experiments, infants exhibited adultlike visual pop-out effects in both delayed recognition and priming paradigms, detecting an L in the midst of 6 +s and vice versa; these effects were symmetrical. The pop-out effects apparently resulted from parallel search: Infants failed to detect 3 Ls among 4 +s. Clearly, some of the same primitive units that have been identified as the building blocks of adult visual perception underlie object recognition early in infancy.