Response to commentaries by Leslie B. Cohen and Alan Slater

Where stimuli are possibly discriminable but do not elicit spontaneous differential looking it is customary to use one or other variation of the habituation-dishabituation method in order to investigate their discriminability, and the literature abounds with such studies. However, there are many var...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Infant and child development 2004-12, Vol.13 (4), p.357-359
Main Authors: Houston-Price, Carmel, Nakai, Satsuki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Babies
Child development
Cognition & reasoning
Familiarity
Habituation
Learning
Preferences
Young Children
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Summary:Where stimuli are possibly discriminable but do not elicit spontaneous differential looking it is customary to use one or other variation of the habituation-dishabituation method in order to investigate their discriminability, and the literature abounds with such studies. However, there are many variations on habituation-dishabituation procedures, varying both within and between the sensory modalities investigated. Additionally, infant attention is a dynamic process which is likely to change over time, and given the great variations in procedures it can often be difficult to know whether infants are giving a familiarity or a novelty preference at test, which can make interpretation of results a difficult, and often controversial problem. Houston-Price and Nakai give some clear examples of the changing nature of infant preferences, and relate them particularly to the amount of familiarisation prior to testing. The model they favour (and which receives a good deal of support) is that put forward by (among others) Hunter and Ames (1988) in which preferences change over the course of familiarisation time, from preference for neither familiarity or novelty, to familiarity, to no preference, to a novelty preference. They suggest that If an attentional shift from what is familiar to what is novel is always found as the encoding of a familiar stimulus is completed then the pattern of change in preference over time should provide crucial information regarding the identity of the obtained effect. I will argue that this attentional shift is not always found, and that in many instances we need converging evidence in order to clarify experimental findings. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
ISSN:1522-7227
1522-7219
DOI:10.1002/icd.381