Motion Processing and From-from-Apparent-Motion in Infancy

Motion-carried information is a salient visual cue used in object perception to parse form in the optical array. The present research examined infants’ ability to extract form shapes in apparent motion stimuli, controlling for color and luminance information within the displays. In these form-from-apparent-motion (FFAM) displays, red “background” random dots are set against an overall white background, with a portion of the random dots set as green “foreground” dots. Although the dots do not move, the portion of the green-colored dots change over successive frames, giving an observer the impression that an object is moving. Infants in two age groups (11-13- and 14-18-month olds) were shown FFAM stimuli in familiarization/visual paired comparison (F/VPC) and discrimination paradigms. Infants in both paradigms extracted shape from apparent motion given luminance cues alone, and color and luminance cues co-varying; but failed to extract shape given color cues alone (Studies 1-2). Given only color cues, infants required denser random-dot displays to extract shape from apparent motion (Study 3). It is possible that both neural pathway separation between dorsal and ventral streams, as well as the ongoing development of edge-insensitive/edge-sensitive processing both play a role in the present results