Experience and distribution of attention: Pet exposure and infants' scanning of animal images.

Although infants' cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants' visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants' eye-movements as they visually investigated a series of images. Infants with pet experience (N = 27) directed a greater proportion of their looking at the most informative region of animal stimuli-the head-than did infants without such experience (N = 21); the two groups of infants did not differ in their scanning of images of human faces or vehicles. Thus, infants' visual cognitions are influenced by everyday experience, and theories of cognitive development in infancy must account for the effect of experience on development.