ABSTRACT
In 1825 Purkinje demonstrated the important influence of peripheral stimuli on adults' vision. When wearing a pair of opaque spectacles with only a small central hole, he discovered he could no longer walk around the room satisfactorily and that fast activities like dancing were impossible. Adults use peripheral information to guide their eye movements toward parts of stimuli judged informative or salient. Peripheral discrimination in infants would be more likely to indicate what can actually be seen in the periphery as infants have little stored information from which to reconstruct a figure and it appears they do not fill in features missing from a highly familiar stimulus. This chapter examines the ability of 3-month-olds to make peripheral discriminations by presenting the two pairs of stimuli at 10°, 20°, and 30° along the horizontal meridian. The studies reported in the chapter tests whether new samples of infants would move their eyes first toward the preferred member.
