The discrimination of orientation by young infants

After being habituated to obliquely oriented stripes, 5–6-week-old infants looked longer at stripes oriented along the opposite diagonal than at the stripes to which they had been habituated. However, they looked equally long at the “habituated” stripes as at their negative (in which black stripes replaced the white stripes and vice versa). These results suggest the infants were processing orientation and not just some regional difference between the stimuli. The results also suggest the visual cortex is functioning to some extent by 5–6 weeks.