Glass patterns are moirés created from a sparse random-dot field paired with its spatially shifted copy. Because discrimination of these patterns is not based on local features, they have been used extensively to study global integration processes. Here, we investigated whether 4- to 5.5-month-old infants are sensitive to the global structure of Glass patterns by measuring visual-evoked potentials. Although we found strong responses to the appearance of the constituent dots, we found sensitivity to the global structure of the Glass patterns in the infants only over a very limited range of spatial separation. In contrast, we observed robust responses in the infants when we connected the dot pairs of the Glass pattern with lines. Moreover, both infants and adults showed differential responses to exchanges between line patterns portraying different global structures. A control study varying luminance contrast in adults suggests that infant sensitivity to global structure is not primarily limited by reduced element visibility. Together our results suggest that the insensitivity to structure in conventional Glass patterns is due to inefficiencies in extracting the local orientation cues generated by the dot pairs. Once the local orientations are made unambiguous or when the interpolation span is small, infants can integrate these signals over the image.

Texture discrimination and bounding contour extraction are essential parts of the object segmentation and shape discrimination process. As such, successful texture and contour processing are key components underlying the development of the perception of both objects and surfaces. By recording visual-evoked potentials, we investigate whether young infants can detect orientation-defined textures and contours. We measured responses to an organized texture comprised of many Gabor patches of the same orientation, alternated with images containing the same number of patches, but all of random orientation. These responses were compared with a control condition consisting of the alternation between two independently random configurations. Significant difference potentials were found as early as 2–5 months, as were significant odd harmonics in the test conditions. Responses were also measured to Gabor patches organized either as circles (all patches tangent to an imaginary circular path) alternated with pinwheels (all patches having a fixed orientation offset from the path). Infants between 6 and 13 months also showed sensitivity to the global organization of the elements along contours. Differential responses to our texture and contour stimuli and their controls could only have been generated by mechanisms that are capable of comparing the relative orientation of 2 or more patches, as no local information at a single patch distinguished the random and organized textures or the circle and pinwheel configurations.