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Infants can organise visual information at just four months
Proximity grouping had not been tested in infants prior to this research,
and grouping by shape had previously been seen only at six or seven
months.
Dr Farran argues that it’s important to understand the development of
low-level processes such as attention from early on in order to understand
how higher-level processes such as object recognition – which requires
grouping by several different visual characteristics – develop.
But the researchers also have a further interest: having established this
pattern of development in normal infants, they intend to turn their atten-
tion to what happens in infants affected by developmental disorders. The
research group already has a new ESRC-funded project under way with
Williams syndrome infants – a condition where attention and visual per-
ception are particularly affected.
Visual grouping research, Dr Farran argues, is essential to providing a
proper starting point for the new research.
“In many atypical disorders, people look at what’s happening in adults
and assume that the same patterns of performance would be observed in
children”, says Dr Farran. ”But often there are quite different patterns. In
cognitive development, small differences can cascade over time, so it’s
very important to get a grip on what’s going on at the start and how it
develops longitudinally, so we can see how the developmental trajectory
grows.”
According to Dr Farran, until recently Williams syndrome children were
rarely diagnosed at an early enough stage. Now diagnosis is often earlier,
Odds and ends - themes and trends 447