Infants are resistant to visual illusions. Free Technical Library News

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Babies are resistant to visual illusions

18.12.2023

Infants under six months of age appear to be resistant to visual illusions that can deceive older children and adults.

As experts have found, the perception of visual illusions in infants depends on their age and the degree of development of the brain’s information processing mechanisms. Understanding this feature may be key to greater insight into the development of human perception and internal processes in early childhood.

In the study, researchers presented a screen with red and green dots to infants aged five to eight months. Dots of one color moved up in the center but down to the right and left, while dots of the other color showed the opposite movement. The visual illusion that occurs when adults look at the center of the screen makes the apparent movement of the dots the opposite.

To find out whether babies succumbed to this illusion, the team conducted an experiment with 40 children, presenting a screen with dots of the same color moving in different directions. Children under six months looked longer at a screen when the dots moved in one direction, while children older than that age preferred a screen where the dots moved in both directions.

Given that infants typically take longer to pay attention to unfamiliar objects, experts conclude that older infants perceive the presented illusion while their younger counterparts do not.

This is probably due to the fact that the information processing mechanism in the brains of the youngest is not yet fully formed, which entails different assumptions about what they see.

Professor Paul Bays from the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study, praised the findings. He emphasized that what we see depends on the expectations of the world that are built into our brains during development: “In this case, the illusion occurs because the adult visual system assumes that what you see in the center of the screen is likely , will also occur on the periphery."

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Simple game improves children's math ability 24.06.2016

A five-minute computer game that develops an intuitive sense of numbers in five-year-olds helps them then cope with more difficult math problems. Such a discovery was made by psychologists from the Krieger School of Science and Arts at Johns Hopkins University (USA), under the guidance of Professor Lisa Feigenson.

As part of the study, 40 five-year-old children, divided into three groups, were offered to play a simple game: blue or yellow spots appeared on the screen, and the child then had to say which color spots were more. The level of difficulty of tasks in the game varied. Children in the first group first solved simple tasks, and then gradually moved on to complex ones. The second group had the opposite. Finally, members of the third group were offered simple and complex tasks mixed up, in random order.

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