1. Introduction Processing of configurational information is often highly affected by inversion Previous research has focused on the perception of static stimuli such as faces, pictures in story books or objects How do infants perceive dynamic events when presented in an inverted orientation? Do they show evidence of meaningful interpretation for upside-down actions? Where do infants look when viewing such actions? Does gaze direction to relevant aspects of an event predict increased looking when those elements are deleted from the event? Background on Inversion Effects Processing of configurational information is particularly affected by inversion whereas perception of discrete features is not FACES: Recognition is more affected by inversion than for non-face stimuli (Yin, 1969). Children do not show special inversion sensitivity to faces over houses until teens (Carey & Diamond, 1977) Meaningful information such as emotional expression can often be completely lost as a result of inversion as in the Margaret Thatcher Illusion (see above) PICTURES & OBJECTS: 18 – 24 month olds naming pictures are not affected by inversion, but do show effects when naming objects (DeLoache et al., 2000) Orientation Specificity for Infant Event Representations Peter Gordon, Kristin Bellanca, Margaret Heller, Noa Porath Teachers College, Columbia University HUG w/ toy GIVE Upside Down w/toy HUG w/o toy GIVE w/o toy GIVE w/ toy Habituation Test GIVE Upside Down w/o toy Eye-Tracking Data % looking to toy location Habituation Data ApproachInteractionDeparture Event Videos ASL 504 infra-red remote eye tracker When 10 month olds see an event of GIVING, they treat a toy undergoing transfer of possession with special status When habituated to viewing a GIVING event on video, they show recovery of looking time when the toy is missing in the NEW test video stimuli The toy is RELEVANT to the action of GIVING (It isn’t giving without the transferred object) Infants do not show recovery of looking time when the missing object is IRRELEVANT to the action, such as when two people are hugging and one is carrying a toy (Fig. 1) Eye Tracking Eye tracking of infants as they watched the GIVE event video revealed that, during the transfer of possession, they looked at the toy more than any other element in the scene When the toy was missing in the test video, they continued to look at where the toy had been in the original video (Fig. 3) With the HUG videos, infants looked at the toy much less during the interaction phase, and almost never when it was no longer in the video (Fig. 4) The GIVE/HUG Effect Effects of Event Inversion for GIVE Eye tracking for the upside down video showed patterns of eye gaze that were almost indistinguishable from those in the upright orientation (Fig. 5) In the w/o toy condition, eye gaze to the location of the missing toy was somewhat attenuated, but was still greater than in the irrelevant-object (HUG) condition Infants’ gaze is drawn to the transferred object for the inverted GIVE event just as in the upright orientation BUT... Do infants understand the inverted GIVE event? In the habituation procedure, infants did not show recovery of looking time when the toy was removed from the GIVE upside down video (Fig. 2) This contrasts sharply with the recovery of LT in the upright condition The effect of inversion appears to be that infants could not make sense of the action and the role of the toy in that action, even though they were looking at the toy in the appropriate locations This suggests that recovery of looking time in habituation for dynamic events is strong evidence of infants’ meaningful interpretation of those events