Habituation, response to novelty, and dishabituation in human infants: tests of a dual-process theory of visual attention.
Two experiments were conducted to test a dual-process theory of infants' performance on visual habituation-dishabituation tasks. The findings demonstrate that (a) infant habituation functions are often nonmonotonic, with fixation increasing before the eventual response waning; (b) this initial increment in responding is related to stimulus "complexity"; (c) response to novelty is enhanced by increasing the "complexity" of the novelty-test stimulus; and (d) dishabituation, followed by decay, occurs for familiarized patterns when retested after the introduction of a "complex" stimulus, but not after introduction of a "simple" stimulus. Following P. Groves and R. Thompson (1970, Psychological Review, 77, 419-450) we propose that infant visual attention to repeated presentations of a stimulus involves two processes, habituation and sensitization.
D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D005556:Form Perception; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D002666:Psychology, Child