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Do 16‐week‐old infants anticipate stimulus offsets?
Author(s) -
Brooks Peggy R.,
Berg W. Keith
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
developmental psychobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.055
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1098-2302
pISSN - 0012-1630
DOI - 10.1002/dev.420120407
Subject(s) - stimulus (psychology) , audiology , psychology , heart rate , developmental psychology , medicine , cognitive psychology , blood pressure
Abstract Twenty alert 16‐week‐old infants were presented with 20‐sec tones at variable intertrial intervals for 10 trials while beat‐by‐beat heart rate responses were recorded to assess response at offset as well as onset of each stimulus. Consistent with past research, onsets elicited deceleratory responses which habituated and showed some evidence of dishabituation with a change in stimulus frequency on the last 2 trials. Offsets also elicited significant deceleratory responses overall, but inspection of pre‐offset heart rate suggested that deceleration in anticipation of the offset event appeared after a few stimulus repetitions and increased in magnitude over trials. However, individual variability was considerable and although the anticipatory response was significant averaged over all trials, the apparent increase over trials did not reach statistical significance. The evidence clearly indicates infants quickly process and act upon temporal information in a stimulus.