Premium
Stimulus duration and repetition rate influence newborns' head orientation toward sound
Author(s) -
Clarkson Marsha G.,
Clifton Rachel K.,
Swain Irina U.,
Perris Eve E.
Publication year - 1989
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.420220704
Subject(s) - stimulus (psychology) , psychology , audiology , duration (music) , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , acoustics , medicine , physics
Three experiments evaluated the effects of stimulus duration and repetition rate on newborns' head orientation responses. In Experiment 1, 28 infants turned toward a 20‐sec continuous rattle sound but not toward 14‐and 500‐msec rattle sounds. Signal energy as a possible explanation for the infants' difficulty orienting toward brief sounds was explored in Experiment 2. Twenty neonates did not turn toward a single 90 dB, 14‐msec rattle sound, although a longer duration (10 sec) sound containing less energy (70 dB) did elicit reliable head orientation. In Experiment 3, 16 neonates heard trains of repeated 14‐msec rattle sounds (2/sec, 1.3/sec, and 1/sec) lasting 10 sec as well as a 10‐sec continuous rattle sound. They turned toward the most rapidly repeating brief sound and the continuous one, while the slowly repeating sounds elicited little head movement in any direction. These results suggest that newborns' head orientation is selectively deficient for brief sounds, that the difficulty does not result from lessened energy in the brief sounds, and that the efficacy of repeated brief sounds depends upon their repetition rates.