Infant Perception Research Essay

Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.
While women tend to be stronger verbally than men, many studies have shown that adult men have an advantage in the ability to imagine complex objects visually and to mentally rotate them. Does this advantage go back to infancy?
"We found the answer is yes," said Scott P. Johnson, a UCLA professor of psychology and an expert in infant perception, brain development, cognition and learning. "Infants as young as 5 months can perform the skill, but only
The researchers showed them a computer-generated image of a 3-D object that resembled an "L," constructed of multicolored cubes. Once the infants were bored with the object, the researchers showed them the same object from a different vantage point, and then the mirror image of the object.
"We're requiring the infants to rotate mentally in three dimensions," Johnson noted.
The 5-month-old boys looked at the mirror image about 1.5 seconds longer than they looked at the more familiar image, a "statistically robust difference" (although girls looked at both images longer than boys did), Moore and Johnson report. The 5-month-old girls looked at the mirror image for slightly less time than they looked at the familiar image.
The boys looked longer at the mirror image, the researchers said, because they recognized that the mirror image was completely new and that the other object was simply the original L-shaped image they had become bored with, shown from a different vantage point — a task that required them to rotate the remembered original object