Infants' Preferences for Familiarity and Novelty During the Course of Visual Processing

Abstract

At 4% months, infants were shown a series of brief choice trials between a stimulus that always remained the same and another that was different on every trial. The point when a consistent preference for the novel stimulus commenced was identified for each infant, and their preferences for the familiar and novel stimuli in trials preceding that point were examined. Infants who saw objects or faces as stimuli both exhibited selective attention to the familiar stimulus prior to preferring novel stimuli, although infants shown kaleidoscope patterns did not. These results document a preference for familiarity early in processing with a procedure that is not subject to ambiguities due to individual differences in processing speed or to collapsing data across infants. The results support a nonlinear model for memory formation during infancy and under-Requests for reprints should be sent to Beverly J. Roder, Infants to Adolescents,

Detecting continuity violations in infancy: a new account and new evidence from covering and tube events

“…Second, as was mentioned earlier, some researchers have suggested that infants tested with violation-of-expectation tasks involving hidden objects may look reliably longer at the unexpected than at the expected events, not because they can represent and reason about hidden objects, but because the familiarization or habituation trials induce in them transient preferences for the unexpected events (e.g. Bogartz et al, 2000;Cashon & Cohen, 2000;Roder et al, 2000;Schilling, 2000;Thelen & Smith, 1994). Evidence that infants also succeed in tasks with test trials only can help alleviate these concerns (for additional evidence and discussion, see Wang et al, 2004).…”

“…Bogartz, Shinskey, &Schilling, 2000;Bogartz, Shinskey,&Speaker, 1997;Cashon&Cohen, 2000;Rivera, Wakeley, & Langer, 1999;Roder, Bushnell, & Sasseville, 2000;Schilling, 2000;Thelen & Smith, 1994;see Wang et al, 2004, for discussion). Could the results of Experiment 1 be attributed to such preferences?…”

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

“…This raises the question, why    Interestingly, a change from engagement with familiar to engagement with unfamiliar stimuli can sometimes even be seen to occur for individual infants across experiments (Roder, Bushnell, & Sasseville, 2000) as well as in the course of a single experiment (Vihman et al, 2004). should the move from producing one to two stable consonants change the infantsÕ response to the Other passages? One possibility is that acquiring a second stable consonant (or VMS) indexes cognitive advance, as suggested by McCune and Vihman,2001 (see introduction for a more detailed description).…”

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

“…Preferential looking to familiar or expected event outcomes often occurs in contexts of greater complexity or with younger infants who presumably have more difficulty processing and extracting regularities in the events (e.g., refs. [35][36][37]. In a recent attempt to provide a comprehensive explanation for infants' familiarity and novelty preferences, Kidd et al (37) argued that infants' looking is guided by interest in the most informative events and displays.…”