Robert Lowell Fantz (1925–1981) was an American

developmental Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilization, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by a sperm cell from a male. The resulting zygote develops through mitosis ...

psychologist who pioneered several studies into infant perception. In particular, the

preferential looking Preferential looking is an experimental method in developmental psychology used to gain insight into the young mind/brain. The method as used today was developed by the developmental psychologist Robert L. Fantz in the 1960s. The Preferential L ...

paradigm introduced by Fantz in the 1961 is widely used in

cognitive development Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult bra ...

and

categorization Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identi ...

studies among small babies. Working at the

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a Private university, private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It was established in 1967 by a merger between Western Reserve University and the Case Institute of Technology. Case ...

, Fantz introduced in 1961 the visual preference paradigm - showing that infants look longer at patterned (e.g. checkered) images rather than uniform images. An innovation in this task was the measurement of the duration of the infant gaze rather than just the direction of first gaze. In 1964, Fantz extended this idea to

habituation Habituation is a form of non-associative learning in which an organism’s non-reinforced response to an inconsequential stimulus decreases after repeated or prolonged presentations of that stimulus. For example, organisms may habituate to re ...

situations, to show that over multiple exposures to the same and a different image, the infant gradually exhibited a preference for the novel stimulus. The researcher could now estimate an infant's discriminatory and perceptual capability by showing different images in highly controlled situations, often within a stagelike box, and observing which changes in the scenarios the infant would perceive as novel. The

American Psychological Foundation The American Psychological Foundation (abbreviated APF) is an American philanthropic organization dedicating to awarding research grants to psychologists in the early stages of their careers. It is affiliated with the American Psychological Assoc ...

has instituted the annual Robert Fantz Memorial Award for research in "perceptual-cognitive development and the development of selective attention"; and also "development of individuality, creativity, and free-choice of behavior."http://www.apa.org/apf/funding/fantz.aspx

References

American developmental psychologists 20th-century American psychologists Case Western Reserve University faculty 1925 births 1981 deaths {{US-psychologist-stub