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?
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!