Colour pop-out in infant response to visual arrays

In order to assess whether infant attention is drawn to discrepancies in the colour of items in the visual field, 24 infants (mean age: 5 months, 2 weeks) were familiarized over a series of brief exposures to visual arrays comprised of triads of schematic faces, with one of these (the target) presented in a different colour to the other two (the distracters). Greater attention to, and hence encoding of, the target item would suggest that infants use colour to segment or parse visual arrays in a manner resembling adult 'pop-out' effects. This was determined in regard to recognition of the colour and shape of target and distracters on a series of paired-comparison tests. The only evidence of recognition on these tests was for the colour and shape of the target item, indicating that the infants had experienced colour pop-out effects. A further experiment, with 24 infants of comparable age and using the same basic procedure as in the first experiment, examined the effect of doubling the number of distractor stimuli in the familiarization arrays. The only evidence of recognition in this case was for the colour of the target stimulus. These results are considered in regard to the question of whether the infants processed the arrays in a parallel or serial way.