Speed vs. thoroughness in infant visual information processing

The relation between speed and cognition is assuming an increasingly prominent position in infant research. The current study examined the potential trade-off between speed of processing, as measured by learning rate and the duration of individual looks, and thoroughness of processing, as measured by the extraction of stimulus detail. Six and one-half month old infants learned to distinguish a familiar face from a series of faces with novel features and were then shown faces which probed their knowledge of the familiar features, in particular their ability to discern subtle changes in these features. Learning rate showed a clear relation to performance on the probe task, but duration of looks showed none. Infants who took longer to learn discriminated between faces with the familiar features and variants with only one or two novel features, whereas those who learned quickly did not. The findings suggest that, st least in some situations, infants who process information slowly may actually extract more detail.