Habituation in the newborn

Abstract

Four experiments are described in which the newborn's ability to habituate to a visual stimulus and subsequently to display novelty/familiarity preferences was explored. The same two types of stimuli, simple geometric shapes and complex colored patterns, were used throughout. The results suggest that newborns will reliably give novelty preferences when an infant-controlled habituation procedure is used. However, no reliable preferences emerged following either a brief exposure to a stimulus, or when novel and familiar stimuli were presented paired together over several trials. In experiment 4 different, novel stimuli were presented on successive infant-controlled trials and the decline in trial length observed during habituation trials was not found. Although this is further evidence that habituation to a repeated visual stimulus does occur in the newborn, half of the subjects in experiment 4 would have met the infant-controlled criterion of habituation: these results are discussed in terms of artifacts that can affect habituation. While there is considerable intra-and intersubject variability in trial duration, and in other dependent measures, the results give support to the model of habituation which assumes it to be an exponentially decreasing process.