Adults are faster and more accurate at detecting changes to animate compared to inanimate stimuli in a change-detection paradigm. We tested whether 11-month-old children detected changes to animate objects in an image more reliably than they detected changes to inanimate objects. During each trial, infants were habituated to an image of a natural scene. Once the infant habituated, the scene was replaced by a scene that was identical except that a target object was removed. Infants dishabituated significantly more often if an animate target had been removed from the scene. Dishabituation results suggested that infants, like adults, preferentially attend to animate rather than to inanimate objects.

在变化检测范式中，与无生命刺激相比，成年人检测有生命变化的速度更快、更准确。我们测试了 11 个月大的孩子检测图像中的有生命物体的变化是否比检测无生命物体的变化更可靠。在每次试验中，婴儿都习惯了自然场景的图像。一旦婴儿习惯了，场景就会被另一个相同的场景所取代，只是目标物体被移除了。如果将有生命的目标从场景中移走，婴儿会更频繁地失去习惯。去习惯的结果表明，婴儿和成年人一样，更喜欢关注有生命的物体，而不是无生命的物体。