Discriminating “top-heavy” versus “bottom-heavy” geometric patterns in 2- to 4.5-month-old infants

Simion, Valenza, Macchi Cassia, Turati, and Umiltà (2002) suggested that newborns preferred “top-heavy” stimuli and such bias may account for neonatal face preference. However, convergent evidence for the discriminability between the top-heavy versus bottom-heavy patterns has not been demonstrated. We used a modified familiarization/novelty procedure (Chien, Palmer, & Teller, 2003) to assess basic discriminability between “top-heavy” and “bottom-heavy” geometric patterns in 2- to 4.5-month-old infants. Each infant was tested with three types of top-heavy and bottom-heavy geometric figures and received both familiarized-to-top-heavy and familiarized-to-bottom-heavy conditions. If infants of this age can discriminate the two configurations and there is no intrinsic bias toward either pattern, we expected to see significant and about equal novelty effects in both familiarization conditions. If there is a strong intrinsic bias for the top-heavy configuration, we expect to see a greater preference for the top-heavy patterns in the familiarization-to-bottom-heavy condition. Our results (N = 24) showed significant and equal novelty preferences in both familiarization conditions across age and figure types, suggesting a reliable discriminability between top-heavy and bottom-heavy configurations and there is no intrinsic bias towards either configuration at this age.