We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies in a graded manner on the basis of quantitative differences in physical salience. Infants viewed arrays of four or six items; one item was a singleton and the other items were identical distractors (e.g., a single cookie and three identical toy cars). At both ages, infants looked to the singletons first more often, were faster to look at singletons, and looked longer at singletons. However, when a computational model was used to quantify the relative salience of the singleton in each display-which varied widely among the different singleton-distractor combinations-we found a strong, graded effect of physical salience on attention and no evidence that singleton status per se influenced attention. In addition, consistent with other research on attention in infancy, the effect of salience was stronger for 6-month-old infants than for 8-month-old infants. Taken together, these results show that attention-getting and attention-holding in infancy vary continuously with quantitative variations in physical salience rather than depending in a categorical manner on whether an item is unique. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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关于视觉搜索中身体显着性作用的新视角：显着性对婴儿注意力的分级效应。


我们对来自北加州的 6 个月和 8 个月大的白人和非白人婴儿（总共 53 名，28 名女孩）进行了视觉搜索任务测试，以确定在同质展示中的独特项目（单例）是否会引起注意因为它是一个独特的单例并以绝对方式“弹出”，或者注意力是否根据物理显着性的数量差异以分级方式变化。婴儿观看四到六件物品的阵列；其中一个项目是单例，其他项目是相同的干扰项（例如，一块饼干和三辆相同的玩具车）。在这两个年龄段，婴儿首先看单身人士的频率更高，看单身人士的速度更快，看单身人士的时间更长。然而，当使用计算模型来量化每个显示器中单例的相对显着性时（在不同的单例干扰组合之间差异很大），我们发现物理显着性对注意力有很强的分级影响，并且没有证据表明单例状态与se影响了注意力。此外，与其他关于婴儿期注意力的研究一致，显着性对 6 个月大婴儿的影响比 8 个月大婴儿更强。总而言之，这些结果表明，婴儿期注意力的获得和保持随着身体显着性的定量变化而不断变化，而不是直接取决于一个项目是否独特。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。