Habituation and dishabituation are the most prevalent measures of infant cognitive functioning, and they have reliably been shown to predict later cognitive outcomes. Yet, the exact mechanisms underlying infant habituation and dishabituation are still unclear. To investigate them, we tested 106 8-month-old infants on a classic habituation task and…

Paper presented at the Merrill-Palmer Institute on Research and Training of Infant Development (Detroit, Mich., Feb. 15-17, 1968).

Examined temporal structure of free toy play by five year olds. Findings showed that the engagement of children's attention was initially fragile; became more fragile for a period of about 12 seconds into toy play episodes; and then grew stronger. (SH)

Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend…

Three related experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of novel and familiar stimuli on infant attention. The procedure in each of the experiments was to place an infant before a matrix panel composed of six rows of six lights. Two patterns of lights were used to obtain the infants' fixation time: (1) a point pattern, a single…

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…