Infants use contextual memory to attend and learn in naturalistic scenes

Infants encounter new objects and learn about object features in relation to a rich and detailed visuospatial context. Using a contextual cueing task, recent work showed that 6- and 10-month-old infants search more efficiently for target objects in repeated rather than novel visuospatial contexts (i.e., arrays of shapes on a blank background). Here, we investigate whether infants' sensitivity to visuospatial context scales up to more complex and potentially more distracting, naturalistic scenes. In an eye-tracking task, 8-month-olds searched for a novel target object in colorful photographs of everyday environments (e.g., bedrooms and kitchens). Repeated (“Old”) contexts co-varied with target locations, such that the target object appeared in exactly the same location on the same scene, while varying (“New”) contexts contained target objects placed in different counterbalanced locations across a variety of scenes. Infants exhibited faster search times, more anticipation of target animation, and longer looking at targets that appeared in Old relative to New contexts. In a subsequent memory test, infants showed better recognition of label-object pairings for target objects that had appeared in Old, rather than New, contexts. These results indicate that infants can use visuospatial contextual information in complex naturalistic scenes to facilitate memory-guided attention and learning of object-paired labels.