Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

Learning is defined as a change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. It is clear that the fetus can learn by means of habituation, classical conditioning and exposure learning. These types of learning will be discussed in relation to learning in the womb and the memory of learned material after birth. Furthermore, the potential…

Three experiments investigated development of mechanisms of selective attention in 60 second graders. Results demonstrated that the ability to process automatically irrelevant stimuli and the habituation mechanisms of attention are observable by grade two, but the inhibitory mechanism was not always evident at this stage. (RJC)

Examined the effect of functional values of stimuli on orienting response elicitation. Subjects were 50 4-month-old infants and were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions. Results suggested the importance of taking into account the functional value of stimuli when analyzing infant attention. (MOK)

This paper presents autoassociator neural networks. A first section reviews the architecture of these models, common learning rules, and presents sample simulations to illustrate their abilities. In a second section, the ability of these models to account for learning phenomena such as habituation is reviewed. The contribution of these networks to…