Infant Control, Response Decrement, and Recovery as an Index of Visual Discrimination in Young Infants

Abstract

The ability of added auditory stimulation to rerecruit visual attending behavior to an unchanging visual stimulus, demonstrated in the previous chapters, was an encouragement to consider the possibility of utilizing visual attention to study auditory stimulation in young infants. In a review of the results of these studies, however, several problems were apparent. Because auditory stimulation was always introduced after a period of no specific auditory stimulus presentation or in contrast to visual stimuli without auditory stimulation, it was not possible to fully rule out general arousal in the recovery of visual behavior with the introduction of auditory stimulation. Also, the three studies cited earlier did not provide clear information for selection of methodology. Self and Paden both employed the infant control procedure but with a fixed trial presentation procedure which, in the case of the Paden results, was not always sufficient to produce clear response decrement in the initial phase. The Culp procedure of using infant control and also bringing each infant to a criterion of response decrement before introducing the change came closer to the individual fashioning of a response decrement criterion, but that procedure, over weeks, was very costly.