Asymmetry of inference in the dishabituation paradigm.

The habituation paradigm is frequently used to assess cognitive development in infants. Habituation to a stimulus by repeated presentation, followed by dishabituation (increased attention to a novel stimulus) is taken to imply discriminability of the novel stimulus. However, infants do not always dishabituate, even when the old and new stimuli are known to be discriminable. It is postulated that failure of dishabituation could be due either to a lack of discriminability of the new stimulus or to failure to relate it to the schema elaborated during habituation. Support for this postulate was obtained in 4 experiments with a total of 200 infants ranging in age from 5.5 to 29 mo. The materials varied from geometric forms through auditory stimuli to conceptual categories. In some cases dishabituation did not occur despite the known discriminability of familiar and novel stimuli. The degree of attention directed toward the new stimulus might better be understood in terms of the degree of discrepancy between the unfamiliar stimulus and the schema for the familiar (the curvilinear discrepancy hypothesis) rather than the ease of discriminability between old and new stimuli. (French abstract) (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)