Responses of Human Infants to Novel Stimuli

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the responses of human infants to novel visual stimuli. Novelty is defined in terms of a time dimension so that a stimulus which is presented to the subject for a period of time (familiarisation period) is said to be novel relative to a stimulus which has not been so presented. Experiments demonstrated that infants will fixate a novel stimulus longer than they fixate a familiar stimulus. This effect was shown to be greater when familiar and novel stimuli differ from each other in two dimensions than when they differ in only one dimension. The decline in responsiveness to stimuli presented for a familiarisation period was shown to be a linear function of time.