Infant visual habituation as a function of exposure time and stimulus similarity.

The course of visual response integration was examined in four-month-old infants (N = 32 boys and girls) by presenting a bull's eye pattern pair and a striped pattern pair on a single display board. On the basis of Jeffrey's serial habituation hypothesis it was predicted that in the early period of exposure the infant's scanning behavior would be limited to two like pairs, but that as attention waned to the similar pairs one or more of the less preferred stimuli would be integrated into the attending response. A measure of three consecutive looks indicated that attention confined to one similar pair decreased significantly over time, whereas the initially lower three-look sequences to two similar and one dissimilar stimuli increased significantly.