Balancing exploration and anti-predation are fundamental to the fitness and survival of all animal species from early life stages. How these basic survival instincts drive learning remains poorly understood. Here, using a light/dark preference paradigm with well-controlled luminance history and constant visual surrounding in larval zebrafish, we…

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…

Prior research suggests that visual features of the classroom environment (e.g., charts and posters) are potential sources of distraction hindering children's ability to maintain attention to instructional activities and reducing learning gains in a laboratory classroom. However, prior research only examined short-term exposure to elements of…

Autism is strongly associated with sensory processing difficulties. We investigate sensory habituation, given its relevance for understanding important phenotypic traits like hyper- and hypo-sensitivities. We collected electroencephalography data from 22 neuro-typical(NT) and 13 autistic(ASD) children during the presentation of visual and auditory…

Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997] "Nature," 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in…

Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

A broad range of studies demonstrate that sleep has a facilitating role in memory consolidation (see Rasch & Born, 2013). Whether sleep-dependent memory consolidation is also apparent in infants in their first few months of life has not been investigated. We demonstrate that 3-month-old infants only remember a cartoon face approximately…

The 4 experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template, then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these nonhuman animal stimuli relative to…

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive…

Although looking-time methods have long been used to measure infant attention and investigate aspects of cognitive development, steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) measures may be more sensitive or practical in some contexts. Here, we demonstrate habituation of infants' SSVEP amplitudes to a flickering checkerboard stimulus, and…

We examined if and when English-learning 17-month-olds would accommodate Japanese forms as labels for novel objects. In Experiment 1, infants (n = 22) who were habituated to Japanese word-object pairs looked longer at switched test pairs than familiar test pairs, suggesting that they had mapped Japanese word forms to objects. In Experiments 2 (n =…

Sustained autonomic arousal during eye contact could cause the impairments in eye contact behavior commonly seen in autism. The aim of the present study was to re-analyze the data from a study by Kaartinen et al. ("J Autism Develop Disord 42"(9):1917-1927, 2012) to investigate the habituation of autonomic arousal responses to repeated…

Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same…

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002). The present study extends these results by…

The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically…