Four-month-olds' recognition of complementary-contour forms

Four-month-old long- and short-looking infants were habituated to a visual form from which 50% of the contour was removed. Infants were then tested for recognition of the visual form with paired comparison trials in which two other 50%-degraded visual forms were simultaneously presented. One of the two degraded forms presented in the test trials was a novel form, and the other form was comprised of the ''complementary contour'' (i.e., the contour not previously shown) of the degraded habituation stimulus. Thus, the task involved a test of infants' recognition of a form across stimuli that shared no common contour. Only infants with attentional profiles characterized by shorter fixation durations recognized forms when tested in this way. These results suggest that some infants are in fact capable of generalizing from one complementary image to another; the observation of this ability in only short-looking infants is consistent with previous suggestions of differences in visual encoding as a function of individual differences in fixation duration.