Constraints on the Use of the Familiarization-Novelty Method in the Assessment of Infant Discrimination

To determine why the familiarization-novelty paradigm tends to underestimate the ability of infants under 4 months of age to detect unidimensional differences between stimuli, groups of 14- and 20-week-olds were given unidimensional discrimination problems of varying difficulty under conditions of b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 1977-09, Vol.48 (3), p.747-762
Main Authors: Caron, Albert J., Caron, Rose F., Minichiello, Marcia D., Weiss, Sandra J., Friedman, Sarah L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age groups
Child psychology
Gender discrimination
Habituation
Infancy
Infants
Mental stimulation
Sensory discrimination
Sons
Test methods
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Summary:To determine why the familiarization-novelty paradigm tends to underestimate the ability of infants under 4 months of age to detect unidimensional differences between stimuli, groups of 14- and 20-week-olds were given unidimensional discrimination problems of varying difficulty under conditions of brief and prolonged familiarization. For both age groups, magnitude of novelty preference was a positive function of length of familiarization, ease of problem, and, to some extent, degree of habituation during familiarization. For young infants, performance was constrained by 3 additional factors: (1) they are more position biased than older infants and thus lose the advantage of the paired-comparison test; (2) they are more subject to the influence of attention tropisms elicited by specific stimuli; and (3) they take much longer to process stimuli. That these constraints apply only to unidimensional discrepancies is indicated by the strong effects obtained on a multidimensional version of 1 of the problems.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.2307/1128324