Attracting and maintaining infant attention during habituation: Further evidence of the importance of stimulus complexity

Abstract

We examined the effect of stimulus complexity and frequency on infants' attention responses during an auditory habituation procedure. Five stimuli of different complexity and frequency were presented repeatedly to 80 5-month-old infants. Quicker attention-getting and longer attention-holding responses were obtained with the more complex stimuli. Furthermore, a progressive decrease in attention-holding, but not in attentiongetting, was observed across trials. The findings are similar to those well established in the visual modality [e.g., Cohen et al. showing that auditory complexity is an important variable in attracting and maintaining infant attention, and that only attention-holding is subject to habituation. Although the complex stimulus contained higher frequencies than the simple or intermediate stimuli, our results further showed that stimulus frequency alone had no significant effect on attention-getting or attention-holding, which strengthens our claim that complexity preference during habituation can be generalized to the auditory modality.

Infants' Selective Attention to Reliable Visual Cues in the Presence of Salient Distractors

“…Infants of all ages continued to make saccades first to the salient distractors; they did not completely inhibit or ignore the distractors, but rather modified the distribution of their attention. This is consistent with other findings that attention holding decreases across prolonged experience with complex stimuli, while attention getting remains relatively stable (Althaus & Mareschal, ; Cohen, DeLoache, & Rissman, ; Richard, Normandeau, Brun, & Maillet, ; Slater, Rose, & Morison, ). Using visual saliency maps to examine infants' looking behavior during category learning, Althaus and Mareschal () found that eye movements in both 4‐ and 12‐month‐olds were driven by low‐level salience characteristics in the early stages of familiarization.…”

Assessing Speech Discrimination in Individual Infants

“…The stimulus alternation condition presented infants with a modified version of the SAPP developed by Best and Jones (1998). SAPP capitalizes on the basic finding that infants show more attention (i.e., habituate more slowly) to more complex stimuli than to simple stimuli (Cohen, DeLoache, & Rissman, 1975;Richard, Normandeau, Brun, & Maillet, 2004;Slater, Rose, & Morison, 1984). Best and Jones (1 998) found that infants exhibit longer looking times when presented with alternating speech sounds (e.g., [ba pa ba pa .…”

Assessing Speech Perception in Children With Cochlear Implants Using a Modified Hybrid Visual Habituation Procedure

“…Although VHP procedures are most often used with infants (up to approximately 18 months), and to our knowledge this methodology has not been used with other pre-school-age (3-5 years) children with CIs, we hypothesized that by making our habituation task more complex both visually and auditorily, we might enhance the novelty effect of novel trials, making the test more likely to detect discrimination abilities (Cohen et al 1975;Slater et al 1984;Richard et al 2004;Houston et al 2007). Horn et al (2007) previously used the HVHP to assess discrimination of two non-word stimuli presented visually and auditorily to children with CIs and hearing children aged between 11 and 24 months.…”