Kirkham, N. 1 , Tummeltshammer, K. 1 , Wu, R. 2 & Mareschal, D. . 1
1 Birkbeck, University of London
2 University of Rochester
There is robust and reliable evidence that infants are sensitive to regularities in the visual domain, which enables them to extract information for further processing (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham et al., 2002) and to predict upcoming events (e.g., Kirkham et al, 2007; Sobel & Kirkham, 2006; 2007). While these studies, which have presented the babies with sparse (often unimodal) stimuli, offer real insight into how the developing system works in situations without distraction or noise, it leaves open the question as to what happens in a noisier, more ?real-world? environment. Across five eyetracking studies with infants from 4- to 10-months, we show that attention to regularities in the environment shifts across the first year of life: Irrelevant information becomes easier to ignore as the baby gets older, and good performance is highly dependent on the relative weightings of multiple cues, predictiveness, salience, and reliability, (Kirkham et al., 2012; Richardson & Kirkham, 2004; Tummeltshammer & Kirkham, 2013; Tummeltshammer, Mareschal & Kirkham, 2014: Tummeltshammer, Wu, Sobel, & Kirkham, 2014; Wu & Kirkham, 2010).