Preferential-looking
One program of research investigates the functional neurobiology underlying visual preferences for novelty. Novelty preferences (longer fixations on new stimuli than on previously presented stimuli) are widely used to assess memory in non-verbal populations like human infants and experimental animals, yet important questions remain about the nature of the processes that underlie them. Our research in this area examines whether novelty preferences reflect a form of declarative memory mediated by the hippocampal memory system, or a form of biased competition in visual selective attention mediated by repetition suppression in visual perceptual areas. Drawing from animal models and adult neuroimaging work, we are using high-density ERPs and EEG (e.g., gamma oscillations) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying infant memory in habituation and novelty detection paradigms.