The emergence of object-based visual attention in infancy: A role for family socioeconomic status and competing visual features.

The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object-based visual attention. We tested 3-5- and 9-12-month-old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants' attention orienting bias toward whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants' attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature. Whether attention was biased toward the whole object or its salient competing feature (e.g., "ball" or "red") changed with age for the color feature, with infants biased toward whole objects with age. Moreover, family socioeconomic status predicted feature-based attention in the youngest infants and object-based attention in the older infants when color feature information competed with whole-object information.