Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the relation between the existence of some perceptual abilities at birth and newborns' perception of partly occluded objects. More specifically, we intended to test whether newborns perception of object identity is determined by proximal retinal stimulation, or whether newborns have the ability to perceive the invariant shapes of stimuli that differed just for the presence/absence of an occluder. Results indicated that newborns were capable of recognising the perceptual identity between two stimuli that were identical except for the presence/absence of an occluder under conditions in which they are provided with additional perceptual support, that is when they were asked to compare among exemplars belonging to two different perceptual categories (open vs closed shapes). This evidence supports the threshold model proposed by Johnson (Johnson, 1997, 2000, 2001), that assumes that perception of object unity depends both on the visual information available to the observer (the sufficiency of visual information), and on the readiness of the observer to attend to that information (the efficiency of perceptual skills).