Abstract

Much evidence has shown that individual differences in the duration of visual fixation in infancy are related to processing of wholistic versus featural properties of the stimuli. In the present study, an object-examining technique (Ruff, Saltarelli, Capozzoli and Dubiner, 1992) was used to test whether the relation between duration of sustained attention and encoding strategies is present also in the case of the visuo-manipulative modality. The results of a corollary experiment provided further support to the notion that examining is a comprehensive measure of infants' manipulative exploratory behavior that reflects active information processing. The study demonstrated that short- and long-examininig infants selected and processed different aspects of the objects. Short examiners relied more on global properties and long examiners relied more on local properties in their visuo-manipulative explorative activity. The findings add to an accumulating body of evidence indicating similarities between visual fixation and object-examining measures as indexes of infant information processing, extending the convergences between the two measures to the domain of individual differences.