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Habituation Project: Preliminary Results

This June marks the end of the Habituation Project at BabyLab Amsterdam, and we’re excited to share that a total of 51 babies took part in the study — an incredible achievement!

On behalf of the whole team, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for everyone’s support and participation in our study.

We wanted to share what we found from preliminary analysis of some of the data. Please note that this is an early look at the data — the full dataset will be further analyzed and used for future academic publication.

WHAT WAS OUR STUDY ABOUT?

In this project, we studied infant habituation—how babies gradually lose interest in repeated sights or sounds—and what factors influence this learning process. Habituation is key to understanding early attention, memory, and cognitive development, especially since infants can’t communicate directly.

Researchers often use habituation to test whether infants can notice differences between stimuli, such as sounds or faces. However, not all infants respond the same way, which is why further research is essential.

In our study, we explored how temperament and stimulus complexity may account for differences in habituation, as well as the use of pupil size as an additional measure of habituation.

Temperament is a baby’s natural style of behaving and reacting to things — like how active they are, how easily they get upset or how they respond to new people and was measured with the questionnaire you filled out.

Stimulus complexity was explored using colorful, moving (complex) versus black-and-white, still (simple) images and tracking how long babies looked at them.

In addition to tracking where babies looked, we also measured pupil size, which can reflect mental effort or interest.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Habituation

On average, infants demonstrated habituation to the stimuli, as expected. This means that with repeated exposure, they were able to process the familiar stimuli more quickly and spent less time looking at them. When new stimuli were introduced, the infants showed renewed interest by looking longer at the unfamiliar images. This pattern of responses suggests that infants are actively learning from and responding to their environment.

Stimulus Complexity

There were no major differences in how quickly infants lost interest (habituated) to simple vs. complex images. Surprisingly, some infants looked longer at the simple images, suggesting these might have held their attention more than expected!

Temperament

While we saw some patterns (for example, babies who are more sensitive showed faster habituation), the findings weren’t strong enough to draw firm conclusions.

Pupil Size

While babies did look less over time (a sign of learning), their pupils didn’t consistently get smaller — sometimes they even got bigger. This suggests that pupil size may capture more complex reactions than we expected, and needs further study.

What is Habituation?

In a recent BabyLab Amsterdam Project, we investigated infant habituation and what factors can affect this learning process.

But, what is habituation, and why does it matter?

Image Source: https://firstchanceforchildren.org/

Infant habituation is a vital learning process where babies gradually show less interest in something they’ve seen or heard before.

It’s like baby gets when your baby gets bored after playing with it for a while.

Studying habituation in infants is important because it gives insight into how early learning, memory, and attention develop. Through research, we can better understand how infants learn and how to support their cognitive and sensory development.

Moreover, because infants cannot communicate with us, many studies use habituation in their paradigms as way of assessing whether the child can discriminate between stimuli . Thanks to this, researchers have discovered that infants can tell the difference between musical excerpts, recognise and discriminate between faces at an early age, and assess their memory performance on tasks. However, a big challenge in this paradigm is that not all babies respond or habituate in the same way, highlighting the importance of more research on this concept.

Read more about our research on habituation in the Projects page!

Nikoleta Papathanasiou

As a master’s student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program with a background in Psychology, I have always been fascinated by how the human mind develops from the very first moments of life. My curiosity about developmental psychology drives me to explore how infants perceive and adapt to the world around them. Spending time with children, especially babies, has deepened my appreciation for their rapid growth and learning. To gain experience in this field, I am joining the Babylab as a volunteer, contributing to the Habituation research, where we use eye tracking to measure different aspects of attention and learning.

Sofija Kostic

Ever since my first lecture in Developmental Psychology during the first year of my Psychology Bachelor’s program, I became fascinated by early development in infants. I am especially interested in how infants explore the world around them and interact with other people, as these early experiences can be crucial in shaping future development in childhood and later in life.

This semester I will be participating in the ongoing study on infant habituation in the Babylab.

Megan Tan

Babies deserve their status as some of the most fascinating creatures to study. What I find most interesting is the connection between brain and behaviour — how cognitive processes shape our actions and how, in turn, our experiences shape cognition. By studying the tiny, yet rapidly growing infant mind, we are able to get a glimpse into how early experiences shape the way we think, see the world, and interact with it right from the start!

I will be supporting the Babylab’s research on infant habituation, where we investigate how infants adapt to new stimuli through eye-tracking.

Diana Valero

Hello! My name is Diana Valero, and I’m a third-year psychology student specializing in clinical developmental psychology. I’ve always been curious about how children and infants process new experiences and how their little minds adapt over time. There are so many things to learn about the world when you are an infant, how is it possible that a tiny human being can grow up to be a functioning adult? What are the mechanisms that develop our thinking?

Research can help us find answers, or at least point us towards the right direction, in understanding the mysteries of the infant mind. This semester, I’ll be helping out at the baby lab with the ongoing research on infant habituation, which investigates how infants respond to new stimuli and what factors influence this learning. I look forward to meeting you all!

Jacoline Blankenstijn

This is me, Jacoline Blankenstijn, a student of psychobiology and psychology with a deep interest in everything related to the brain, development, and behavior. What fascinates me most is the immense number of changes that take place in a baby’s brain. Infancy lays the foundation for everything that follows—the very core of who we become. That’s why the research conducted at Babylab Amsterdam is so valuable and incredibly interesting!

During the final phase of my bachelor’s degree, I am doing an internship here, contributing to the Habituation study. This research helps us understand how babies respond to stimuli, how they learn, and how they differ from one another in these learning processes.

Berenike Simon

When I first came in contact with Developmental Psychology during my Bachelor of Psychology, I immediately started marveling at all the creative ways psychologists set out to understand the kaleidoscopic minds of babies and children. Understanding children and babies from an adult’s perspective can be challenging. But bridging the gap between our two worlds is absolutely central to ensuring babies and children’s health, happiness and safety- it can also teach us a lot about who we are as adults!

To gather more experience in the field of developmental psychology I’m currently doing an internship at the Babylab where I’m supporting Elin and Rosalie on their research on Habituation, exploring how babies respond and adapt to different stimuli.

Habituation research: how do infants learn?

In this study, we focus on the simplest form of learning: habituation. Habituation is the ability to get used to repeated or continuous stimuli. Previous research has shown that there are significant differences in the way infants habituate. This could potentially be explained by individual differences in temperament and/or stimulus complexity.

To investigate this, we have infants aged 5 to 12 months watch a screen displaying alternating complex and simple images. By measuring the infants’ viewing behavior, we can determine if they respond differently to complex images compared to simple ones. In addition to observing viewing behavior, we use a questionnaire to assess the infants’ temperament. By linking the results of this questionnaire to the habituation data, we can examine if there is a relationship between temperament and the way infants habituate. The experiment takes approximately 10-15 minutes.

Would you like to participate? Click here to sign up!

Elin Kroes

As a bachelor’s student in Psychobiology, I am very interested in the brain. During my studies, I discovered that, in addition to the brain, I am also fascinated by the development of (young) children. Besides my studies, I spend a lot of time babysitting, and there is nothing I enjoy more than seeing how much the children develop in the short period I haven’t seen them. To conclude my bachelor’s degree, I am currently doing an internship at the Babylab in Amsterdam, a place that perfectly aligns with my interests. I am working on the Habituation research, where we use eye tracking to measure and investigate forms of attention and learning.