Contrast discrimination in human infants

The ability to detect differences in spatial contrast is crucial to object recognition and identification. This ability is generally examined by measuring the contrast discrimination function. This function represents, for a variety of conditions, the smallest contrast difference required to discriminate otherwise identical patterns. We examined human infants' ability to discriminate patterns on the basis of differences in spatial contrast. The forced-choice preferential looking procedure was used to estimate contrast increment thresholds at a number of background contrasts. The Weber fractions of 6- and 12-week-old infants were about 1 log unit higher than adult values for background contrasts ranging from 0.14 to 0.55. Furthermore, the slopes of infants' discrimination functions were much shallower than those of adults. These age differences in contrast discrimination imply certain changes in the neural mechanisms that underlie contrast encoding. They also aid our understanding of the anomalies observed in early pattern vision.