1992 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Development of voluntary/in-voluntary eye movements and perceptual figure-ground segregation in the newborn and the infant.
| Project/Area Number |
02610037
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
Psychology
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
SHIMOJO Shinsuke Tokyo Univ. Psychology, Asoc. Prof., 教養学部, 助教授 (70183837)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1990 – 1992
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| Keywords | newborn / infant / visual acuity / stereopsis / spatial vision / figure-ground segregation / visual attention / motion vision |
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| Research Abstract |
(1) A "figure-ground-reversal, ambiguous apparent-motion display" was newly designed and developed (Shimojo 1992, Fig.8). As a result of preliminary experiments employing this paradigm, at least 6- to 8-month-old infants consistently showed head and eye movements accordingly to figure-ground segregation in the display. This opens a new approach to infantile development of involuntary eye movements in its tight relation to the development of visual perception.
(2) Development of grating acuity, hyper acuities, binocularity, spatial vision were summarized and reviewed (Shimojo 1992). These findings were then discussed in terms of monocular and binocular information processing based on maturation of the peripheral and central visual pathways.
(3) The hypothesis of "non-selective convergence" was proposed as for prestereoptic binocular vision and onset of stereopsis. A variety of psychophysical results in infants ranged from 1 to 10 months of age were unanimously consistent with this hypothesis. These findings and hypothesis were further discussed together with the latest findings in psychophysics of adult's binocularity, leading to a new insight on binocular visual functions in general (Shimojo 1993).
(4) When recognition of space including the "self body" was assessed through the mirror-reversal phenomena in cutaneous perception and motor reproduction, the results were qualitatively the same as those in the normal and congenitally blind subjects (Nagata & Shimojo 1992). Moreover, socalled joint attention and social referencing are currently investigated at about 1-year olds.
(5) Psychophysical experiments on visual-spatial attention in the normal adult revealed that a new kind of motion illusion is experienced when there is a gradient in terms of information processing efficiency across the visual field, based on either stimulus-driven or voluntary attention (Hikosaka et al. 1993).
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