Date of Award

1993

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Psychology

Keywords

Psychology, Developmental.

Supervisor

Orr, Robert,

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that newborn infants are capable of discriminating stationary objects based on one stimulus dimension. The present study asked the following questions: can newborns process spatial orientation changes?; does stimulus movement influence spatial orientation processing?; can stimulus movement changes be processed?; and can changes to two dimensions of a stimulus be detected? Forty-eight, 2-day-old newborns were administered successive presentations of either stationary or moving, high contrast, black-and-white square wave gratings (stripes) and their level of visual fixation was recorded. The results indicated that newborns are capable of detecting spatial orientation changes in stationary and moving stimuli. Moreover, the findings indicated that newborn infants were capable of detecting direction of movement changes. It was demonstrated that newborn infants could detect changes to two dimensions of a stimulus concurrently. It was concluded that newborns are capable of processing more than one stimulus dimension simultaneously, demonstrating that their information processing capabilities are more sophisticated than previously thought. Finally, it was hypothesized that newborns encode stimulus dimension information separately, but can integrate these memories during object discrimination tasks.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1993 .L375. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 32-02, page: 0725. Adviser: Robert Orr. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1993.

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