Babies take their first major strides with their eyes, not their legs, as they rapidly distinguish among playpens, pacifiers, and a plethora of other objects. These feats of sight draw on infants’ ability to keep track of pairs of shapes that regularly appear in the same spatial arrangement, according to a new study.
Sensitivity to such pairings in the visual world provides babies–by 9 months of age–with a foothold for learning to recognize all sorts of items, propose József Fiser and Richard N.
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