Abstract
Many prominent studies of infant cognition over the past two decades have relied on the fact that infants habituate to repeated stimuli – i.e. that their looking times tend to decline upon repeated stimulus presentations. This phenomenon had been exploited to reveal a great deal about the minds of preverbal infants. Many prominent studies of the neural bases of adult cognition over the past decade have relied on the fact that brain regions habituate to repeated stimuli – i.e. that the hemodynamic responses observed in fMRI tend to decline upon repeated stimulus presentations. This phenomenon has been exploited to reveal a great deal about the neural mechanisms of perception and cognition. Similarities in the mechanics of these two forms of habituation suggest that it may be useful to relate them to each other. Here we outline this analogy, explore its nuances, and highlight some ways in which the study of habituation in functional neuroimaging could yield novel insights into the nature of habituation in infant cognition – and vice versa.
Highlights
An important property of the human mind is that novel information and repeated information are treated differently
While the discovery of novelty-seeking behavior extends far back into the history of psychological science, our goal in this paper is to explore the relationship between two particular manifestations that have been exploited in rather different subfields of cognitive science: studies of infant perception and cognition based on novelty preferences in looking time, and studies of adult perception and cognition based on repetition attenuation as measured with functional neuroimaging
The visual paired comparison procedure was an early example of this approach: when presented with two complex visual patterns, infants looked longer at a new pattern compared to one that they had previously seen several times (Fantz, 1964). In this case it is unclear whether the increased looking reflects a preference for the novel stimulus or avoidance of the repeated stimulus
Summary
An important property of the human mind is that novel information and repeated information are treated differently. Attenuation can be observed to a repeated stimulus despite multiple intervening stimuli which themselves elicit normal (i.e. unhabituated) responses, even over long delays (van Turennout et al, 2000) and even when the interruption contains other examples from the same category (e.g. Buckner et al, 1998; Dobbins et al, 2004; Henson et al, 2000; Turk-Browne et al, 2006).
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