The Effect of Local Element Density on Processing of Visual Hierarchical Patterns: An Infant ERP Study

Previous research with infants, children, and adults has shown that global, or configural, information is processed before local, or featural, information in high density visual hierarchical patterns (Freeseman, Colombo, & Coldren, 1993; Ghim & Eimas, 1988; Kimchi, 1988; Navon, 1981; Navon, 1977). The current study used event-related potential to determine if a well documented bias toward global processing in infancy can be disrupted when the number and density of local elements is reduced through increasing the distance between elements. Infant responses were compared between high and low density conditions to global and local novel patterns and to familiar patterns. A significant interaction was found between stimulus type and stimulus density in the Late Slow Wave component. The findings are consistent with previous research which shows that infants process high density visual patterns at the global level, and also indicate that infants fail to effectively process either global or local information in low density hierarchical patterns.