Four-Month-Old Infants' Visual Investigation of Cats and Dogs: Relations With Pet Experience and Attentional Strategy

We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants without pet experience, both directing more visual attention to the informative head regions of the animals, particularly when comparing stimuli, and maintaining their attention to an individual animal, resisting the pull on their attention by the other visible animal. Individual differences in general attentional strategies as assessed during a pretest had similar but weaker relations to visual scanning patterns. There was some evidence that the 2 factors were interactively associated with visual inspection, supporting the findings of Kovack-Lesh and colleagues (Kovack-Lesh, Horst, & Oakes, 2008; Kovack-Lesh, Oakes, & McMurray, 2012) that infants' learning about and memory for this type of stimuli is jointly determined by pet experience and attentional style.