Stimulus Movement and Complexity as Determinants of Infants' Visual Fixation Responses

Abstract

<p> This thesis is concerned with the systematic variation of stimulus movement and complexity in order to investigate developmental changes in visual fixation. It was shown that there is a developmental transition in the way in which infants extract visual information from the environment, with younger infants responding primarily through length of fixation, and older infants through the number of fixations. It was demonstrated that the faster a stimulus moves, the more fixation it elicits from infants; that older infants appear to be more responsive to differences in speed than younger infants; and that the more complex the stimulus, the greater the visual response to it. Percent measures were found to be more reliable than absolute measures in making age comparisons. </p>