Adults are faster and more accurate at detecting changes to animate compared to inanimate
stimuli in a change-detection paradigm. We tested whether 11-month-old children detected
changes to animate objects in an image more reliably than they detected changes to
inanimate objects. During each trial, infants were habituated to an image of a natural
scene. Once the infant habituated, the scene was replaced by a scene that was identical
except that a target object was removed. Infants dishabituated significantly more often if
an animate target had been removed from the scene. Dishabituation results suggested that
infants, like adults, preferentially attend to animate rather than to inanimate
objects.