Newborn response to auditory stimulus discrepancy.
Newborns were assessed for their recovery of head turning toward laterally presented auditory stimuli (titi) that varied from a familiar standard on 1 of 5 levels of fundamental frequency. Following habituation to repeated standard trials, newborns recovered to 14% and 21%, but not to 0%, 7%, or 28% discrepancies, indicating that recovery was a quadratic function of the degree of stimulus-schema discrepancy. Moreover, newborns reliably turned away from the standard stimulus during posthabituation no-change control trials, indicating that the neural network associated with that stimulus was not fatigued. Infants in every condition showed recovery of head turning to a novel posttest stimulus (papa). These data are interpreted with a dual processing model postulated to include both reflexive (context-independent) orientation and stimulus-schema comparison process (context-dependent) orientation.
Weiss
M J
MJ
Jewish General Hospital, McGill University.
Zelazo
P R
PR
Swain
I U
IU
D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn / Q000523:psychology*; D013017:Sound Localization