Developmental changes in the contextual control of recognition

In three experiments, we explored potential developmental differences in the contextual control of target recognition using elementary perceptual features that differed only in their spatial relations. Three- and 6-month-old infants were trained in the presence of black horizontal and vertical line segments arranged as Ls, Ts, or +s on a pink background and were tested in the presence of the same line segments in a different spatial arrangement. At both ages, target recognition required a match between the primitive perceptual features in the test context and those present during training. Delayed recognition by younger but not older infants also required a match between specific spatial arrangements of the horizontal and vertical segments (+s versus Ls or Ts), despite the fact that infants of both ages had initially encoded these relations. These data suggest that by 6 months, spatial information in the periphery is detected preattentively via a parallel-processing mechanism, as it is in children and adults.