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.