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The Discrepancy Hypothesis of Attention and Affect in Infants
Abstract
In its most general form, the discrepancy hypothesis states that an organism attends and affectively responds to new stimuli as an inverted-U function of the stimuli’s physical or conceptual discrepancy (i.e., dissimilarity) from a well-familiarized standard stimulus. That is, moderate discrepancies from highly familiar stimuli receive both the highest degree of attention and positive affect, whereas stimuli that are quite familiar or extremely different from what the organism knows well receive relatively less attention and less positive—perhaps even negative—affective responses and evaluations. The hypothesis is presented graphically in Figure 1.
... Such attraction towards semi-novelty (or semi-familiarity) has been explained mainly through the "discrepancy hypothesis" (e.g., Dember & Earl, 1957;McCall & McGhee, 1977). According to it, the attentional shift from familiar towards novel stimuli is thought to occur when the encoding of the familiar stimulus is complete, that is, when there is no discrepancy between the stimulus input and its internal representation (Kagan & et al, 1971;McCall & Kagan, 1967;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Pascalis & De Haan, 2003). ...
... Such attraction towards semi-novelty (or semi-familiarity) has been explained mainly through the "discrepancy hypothesis" (e.g., Dember & Earl, 1957;McCall & McGhee, 1977). According to it, the attentional shift from familiar towards novel stimuli is thought to occur when the encoding of the familiar stimulus is complete, that is, when there is no discrepancy between the stimulus input and its internal representation (Kagan & et al, 1971;McCall & Kagan, 1967;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Pascalis & De Haan, 2003). The preference for processing semi-novelty would be caused by a residual activity in memory acting as a "proto-schema" until stimuli are stored in the long-term memory (Bogartz et al., 1997). ...
... Previous arousal theorists explicitly assumed that an exploratory behaviour is "a behaviour with the sole function of changing the stimulus field" (Berlyne, 1963). In other words, from infancy to adulthood, attentional shifting and the resulting exploratory behaviours would be mainly used to maintain the aforementioned optimal-level of stimulation and, by doing so, intermediate optimal rates of information absorption (Berlyne, 1960;Bornstein, 1989;Dember & Earl, 1957;Hunter et al., 1983;Lewkowicz & Turkewitz, 1981;Maurer & Maurer, 1988;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Raju, 1980;Schneirla, 1959;Zuckerman, 1994). ...
Phenomena such as engagement, attention and curiosity rely heavily on the “optimal-level of stimulation (or arousal)” model, which suggests they are driven by stimuli being neither too simple nor too complex. Two points often overlooked in psychology are that each stimulus is simultaneously processed with its context, and that a stimulus complexity is relative to an individual’s cognitive resources to process it. According to the “optimal-level of stimulation” model, while familiar contexts may decrease the overall stimulation and favour exploration of novelty, a novel context may increase the overall stimulation and favour preference for familiarity. In order to stay closer to their optimum when stimulation is getting too high or too low, individuals can explore other stimuli, adopt a different processing style or be creative. The need and the ability to adopt such strategies will depend upon the cognitive resources available, which can be affected by contextual stimulation and by other factors such as age, mood or arousability. Drawing on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology, we provide here an updated “optimal-level of stimulation” model, which is holistic and coherent with previous literature. Once taken into account the role of contextual stimulation as well as the diverse factors influencing internal cognitive resources, such model fits with and enriches other existing theories related to exploratory behaviors. By doing so, it provides a useful framework to investigate proximate explanations underlying learning and cognitive development, and to develop future interventions related, for example, to eating, and learning disorders.
... The two-process model proposed by Weiss et al. (1988) is consistent with a description of stimulus discrepancy as subjective uncertainty-a concept suggested by Berlyne (1966) and elaborated by McCall and McGhee (1977). The latter proposed that "subjective uncertainty produced by the scanning of memory and the continual comparing of a new stimulus with the memory of the standard" determines discrepancy behavior (p. ...
... The negative affect associated with subjective uncertainty appears to be more relevant to an explanation of extreme discrepancy, despite McCall and McGhee's (1977) admitted difficulty establishing this link. This difficulty caused them to assert that "negative affect will not be a common response to large magnitudes of discrepancy unless the special nature of the stimuli or situation increases the subjective uncertainty" (pp. ...
Research with 2-day-old neonates shows that they create mental representations—schemata—for their experiences and that this cognitive ability is hardwired and functional at birth. This research and studies with older infants indicate that both the formation and the expansion of schemata occur through moderate discrepancies, a concept that Jerome Kagan promoted conceptually and through his research. Discrepancy, as distinct from novelty, is insufficiently acknowledged in the literature on schema theory. The schema is both cognitive and affective and develops in unison in a curvilinear pattern with a gradual onset and exponential expansion. Optimal attentiveness and positive affect occur at the peak of formation and to moderate discrepancies. Redundancy beyond the optimal level produces decreasing interest and positive affect and increasing negative affect resulting in boredom and avoidance. These characteristics of schema development are difficult to study with older children and adults. Rumelhart (1980) regarded the schema as the “building block of cognition” and Kagan (2002) called its expansion through moderate discrepancies an “engine of change” implying widespread application for cognition and behavior throughout life. Kagan urged the search for structure (form) as opposed to function in cognition, and the curvilinear pattern of schema development and its characteristics, it is argued, is the structure he sought. Implications and select applications of schema development and expansion are presented.
... The discrepancy hypothesis provided a further prediction that look duration to novel stimuli should show an inverted U-shaped pattern based on amount of discrepancy from familiar stimuli. Findings from several studies support this hypothesis with infants demonstrating the longest looking to stimuli that differ from the familiar to a moderate extent (McCall & McGhee, 1977; see also Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012;Piantadosi, Kidd, & Aslin, 2014). ...
... Kagan (2008) has argued for the importance of utilizing multiple measures when studying perceptual and cognitive processes in infancy (see also Nelson et al., 2002;Quinn, 2008;Reynolds & Guy, 2012). He noted that relations between novelty and infant look duration often follow a curvilinear trend based on amount of discrepancy between the novel and familiar stimuli as opposed to a basic linear trend based on degree of novelty (Kagan, 2002;McCall & McGhee, 1977), thus calling into question basic interpretations of look duration reflecting stimulus encoding. In line with Kagan's (2002) conclusions, the current findings highlight the importance of utilizing multiple measures in research on infant attention and memory processes. ...
This study examined behavioral, heart rate (HR), and event-related potential (ERP) correlates of
attention and recognition memory for 4.5-, 6-, and 7.5-month-old infants (N = 45) during
stimulus encoding. Attention was utilized as an independent variable using HR measures. The
Nc ERP component associated with attention and the Late Slow Wave (LSW) associated with
recognition memory were analyzed. 7.5-month-olds demonstrated a significant reduction in Nc
amplitude with stimulus repetition. This reduction in Nc was not found for younger infants.
Additionally, infants only demonstrated differential LSW amplitude based on stimulus type on
attentive trials as defined by HR changes. These findings indicate that from 4.5 to 7.5 months,
infants' attentional engagement is influenced by an increasingly broader range of stimulus
characteristics.
... Our findings are consistent with the results of Linting et al. (2013), who found evidence for a threshold at the upper end of the noise spectrum in home-based care. In addition and in contrast to Linting et al. (2013), we also found that extremely low noise intensity and noise variability levels were associated with lower levels of child emotional well-being, and they nicely dovetail with older work on the best fit between stimulus flow and functional outcomes which often might not be found at the extreme ends of the stimulus flow or intensity distribution (Hunt, 1961;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Wachs, 1977). ...
... Child gender, hours in care, caregiver's years of experience and working hours did not predict child well-being. Because the influence of noise, or more broadly, chaos, may be conceptualized as the optimal fit between the individual's processing capacity and the environmental stimulus flow, the effects of noise on well-being and development might be dependent on the dynamic Piagetian interplay of accommodation and assimilation, and on individual differences in the capacity to self-regulate the influx and processing of noisy stimuli as suggested in the optimal stimulation hypothesis (Hunt, 1961;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Wachs, 1977). ...
Children attending center-based child care are daily exposed to high noise levels. Associations between noise levels, noise variability, caregiving quality and child well-being were investigated in centers (N = 64) involving children up to four years (N = 245; M = 34.50 months). We examined minimum and maximum levels of noise and noise variability for optimal child well-being. Nonlinear regression analysis confirmed the threshold hypothesis: optimal child well-being was observed for noise levels over 60 dbA and below 65 dbA, and for noise variability over 6.69 dbA and below 7.44 dbA. Linear multilevel regression analysis showed that more hours in care, higher child age and higher general child care quality were related to higher levels of well-being. Noise, a major aspect of environmental chaos, has adverse outcomes on child wellbeing in center child care. The regulation of noise levels in child care centers is needed to provide optimal child well-being.
... Psychologists posit that interest arises when individuals notice the incongruity of information (Nunnally, 1981) or gaps in current knowledge (Loewenstein, 1994). Previous research has found that events marked by novelty, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict tend to kindle interest (Berlyne, 1978;McCall & Kennedy, 1980;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Walker, 1981). An entrepreneurial adversity poses uncertain, ambiguous, or equivocal situations that are not captured well by the existing knowledge (Townsend et al., 2018); thus, it evinces a knowledge deficit that ignites interest (e.g., "I don't know this. ...
As the business landscape escalates the level of uncertainty and thus profoundly disrupts entrepreneurship, it is crucial to understand risk-taking as a coping strategy for entrepreneurs with limited resources. Past studies have been fragmented: Some researchers have focused on creative risk-taking, whereas others have looked at unethical risk-taking. Little is known about how and when entrepreneurs respond to adversity in either a creative or an expedient manner. We posit that entrepreneurs respond to adversity by using either entrepreneurial bricolage behavior (EBB) or unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Drawing from the emotivational account, we develop each theoretical model of bricolage and UPB to better understand how entrepreneurs’ emotional states play a critical role in their reactions to adversity. We theorize that, and test whether, entrepreneurial adversity is positively related to EBB and increase in EBB over time through increased interest when trait resilience is high. Also, we conceptualize and examine whether entrepreneurial adversity is positively related to UPB and increase in UPB over time through increased anger when trait resilience is low. We conducted a five-month longitudinal study of 100 entrepreneurs (482 observations). Our findings largely corroborated the hypotheses. Our study advances our understanding of entrepreneurs’ risk-taking by showing when and how they respond creatively or unethically.
... Previous arousal theorists assumed that from infancy to adulthood, attentional shifting and the resulting behaviors would be mainly used to maintain an optimal level of arousal or stimulation (Berlyne, 1960(Berlyne, , 1963Bornstein, 1989;Dember & Earl, 1957;Hunter et al., 1983;Lewkowicz & Turkewitz, 1981;Maurer & Maurer, 1988;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Raju, 1980;Schneirla, 1959;Zuckerman, 1994). So, they assumed an inverted U-shape relationship between stimuli "arousal potential" and preference ( Figure 1a). ...
More and more research is showing how different environments can lead to greater or lower creative skills. The purpose of this concept paper is to introduce a novel application of the optimal‐level of arousal model that could address inconsistencies present in the literature. After introducing possible definitions of creativity, I discuss the optimal‐level of arousal theory and how considering the “arousal” and “mood changing” potentials of contexts could enlighten findings related to inter‐individual differences, domain‐specificities, developmental aspects, and gender differences. Among other things, this model will clarify the factors influencing motivation to display creative skills which could improve the external validity of creativity studies. Examples of the kinds of hypotheses that can be tested by applying this model in future creative studies will also be proposed.
... Several lines of research have suggested that both children and adults in general prefer stimuli which somehow hit what might be described as a "sweet spot" of surprise (e.g., Bloom, 2010Bloom, , 2020Dember & Earl, 1957;McCall & McGhee, 1977). Such sweet spots are typified by only moderate differences between any given stimuli and the observer's prior knowledge of that stimuli (Mather, 2013). ...
In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework (PP) may provide elements for a proximate model of play in children and adults. We propose that play is a behavior in which the agent, in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate toward sweet-spots of relative complexity with the goal of resolving surprise.We further propose that play is experientially associated with a feel-good quality because the agent is reducing significant levels of prediction error (i.e., surprise) faster than expected.We argue that this framework can unify a range of well-established findings in play and developmental research that highlights the role of play in learning, and that casts children as Bayesian learners. The theory integrates the role of positive valence in play (i.e., explaining why play is fun); and what it is to be in a playful mood.Central to the account is the idea that playful agents may create and establish an environment tailored to the generation and further resolution of surprise and uncertainty. Play emerges here as a variety of niche constructionwhere the organism modulates its physical and social environment in order to maximize the productive potential of surprise
... The phenomenon also has several variants. One is the discrepancy hypothesis (Blijlevens et al 2012;Haber 1958;McCall & McGhee 1977), which suggests that people have a preference for stimuli that differ slightly, but not too much or too little, from a norm (see also Mather, 2013). Another is the "law" of Yerkes and Dodson (1908), where people are said to perform better at a moderate level of arousal rather than lower or higher. ...
Luan and Kim (2022) present a compelling analysis of the curvilinear relationship between objective and subjective measures of a movie's novelty. Their proxy for an objective measure was coarse, but straightforward and effective. Their proxy for a subjective measure was a modified content analysis of reviews of each movie, scored for the proportion of words in the review that seemed to reflect novelty. Luan and Kim found that a moderate amount of objective novelty garnered the highest measure of subjective novelty. The theoretical framework behind their data can be recast as support for Daniel Berlyne's views of preference as a function of familiarity/novelty.
... Curiosity in children would result from a discrepancy between their expectations and the reality, so that they prefer situations allowing them to assimilate new information into their learned schemas and accommodate their schemas to account for new experiments (Piaget, 1952). Following Piaget, the motivation of children would be more intense for an optimal level of discrepancy, whereas a too low discrepancy would make assimilation too easy, and a too high level of discrepancy would make them unable to relate the new situation to the known schemas (McCall and McGhee, 1977). Hebb conceptualized a preference for an optimal level of incongruity (Hebb, 1955), where a mismatch between expectations and perceptions is "pleasurable", however a too incongruous situation is unpleasant. ...
Babies and children are curious, active explorers of their world. One of their challenges is to learn of the relations between their actions such as the use of tools or speech, and the changes in their environment. Intrinsic motivations have been little studied in psychology, such that its mechanisms are mostly unknown. On the other hand, most artificial agents and robots have been learning in a way very different from humans. The objective of this thesis is twofold: understanding the role of intrinsic motivations in human development of speech and tool use through robotic modeling, and improving the abilities of artificial agents inspired by the mechanisms of human exploration and learning. A first part of this work concerns the understanding and modeling of intrinsic motivations. We reanalyze a typical tool-use experiment, showing that intrinsically motivated exploration seems to play an important role in the observed behaviors and to interfere with the measured success rates. With a robotic model, we show that an intrinsic motivation based on the learning progress to reach goals with a modular representation can self-organize phases of behaviors in the development of tool-use precursors that share properties with child tool-use development. We present the first robotic model learning both speech and tool use from scratch, which predicts that the grounded exploration of objects in a social interaction scenario should accelerate infant vocal learning of accurate sounds for these objects' names as a result of a goal-directed exploration of the objects. In the second part of this thesis, we extend, formalize and evaluate the algorithms designed to model child development, with the aim to obtain an efficient learning robot. We formalize an approach called Intrinsically Motivated Goal Exploration Processes (IMGEP) that enables the discovery and acquisition of large repertoires of skills. We show within several experimental setups including a real humanoid robot that learning diverse spaces of goals with intrinsic motivations is more efficient for learning complex skills than only trying to directly learn these complex skills.
... Considering that presenting a congruent sound induces faster orientation towards a target stimulus during a visual exploration task [55] and that children with ASD demonstrate atypical auditory processing with preserved or heightened abilities in musical processing [56,57], the auditory component might have biased attentional focus in the two paradigms in different ways. Third, Shic et al. [16] proposed that children attend to elements that are within reach of their ability to comprehend, according to McCall and McGhee's [58] moderate discrepancy hypothesis, which could result in reduced attention to the shared activity especially in children with higher symptom severity. In contrast to Shic's task, the activity presented in our study might not have induced such a bias, given its simplicity. ...
Background
Typical development of socio-communicative skills relies on keen observation of others. It thus follows that decreased social attention negatively impacts the subsequent development of socio-communicative abilities in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition, studies indicate that social attention is modulated by context and that greater social difficulties are observed in more socially demanding situations. Our study aims to investigate the effect of social complexity on visual exploration of others’ actions in preschoolers.
Methods
To investigate the impact of social complexity, we used an eye-tracking paradigm with 26 typically developing preschoolers (TD, age = 3.60 ± 1.55) and 37 preschoolers with ASD (age = 3.55 ± 1.21). Participants were shown videos of two children engaging in socially simple play (parallel) versus socially complex play (interactive). We subsequently quantified the time spent and fixation duration on faces, objects, bodies, as well as the background and the number of spontaneous gaze shifts between socially relevant areas of interest.
Results
In the ASD group, we observed decreased time spent on faces. Social complexity (interactive play) elicited changes in visual exploration patterns in both groups. From the parallel to the interactive condition, we observed a shift towards socially relevant parts of the scene, a decrease in fixation duration, as well as an increase in spontaneous gaze shifts between faces and objects though there were fewer in the ASD group.
Limitations
Our results need to be interpreted cautiously due to relatively small sample sizes and may be relevant to male preschoolers, given our male-only sample and reported phenotypic differences between males and females.
Conclusion
Our results suggest that similar to TD children, though to a lesser extent, visual exploration patterns in ASD are modulated by context. Children with ASD that were less sensitive to context modulation showed decreased socio-communicative skills or higher levels of symptoms. Our findings support using naturalistic designs to capture socio-communicative deficits in ASD.
... It was then fi ltered through the ideas of the British-Canadian psychologist and aesthetician Daniel Berlyne. 3 It also has several variants. One is the discrepancy hypothesis (Blijlevens et al. 2012;Haber 1958;McCall and McGhee 1977), 4 which suggests that people have a preference for stimuli that differ slightly, but not too much or too little, from a norm. Another is the "law" of Yerkes and Dodson (1908), where people are said to perform better at a moderate level of arousal rather than either at a lower or higher level. ...
Much of aesthetics is based in psychological responses. Yet seldom have such responses—couched in empirically based psychological terms—played a central role in the discussion of movie aesthetics. Happily, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema does just that. This commentary discusses some history and some twists and turns behind Berliner’s analysis.
... 10. See Robert McCall and Paul McGhee (1977) for an early discussion of the discrepancy hypothesis, which compares stimulus familiarity with interest by infants, and Celeste Kidd, Steven Piantadosi, and Richard Aslin (2012) for a rigorous, information-theoretic analysis of complexity and infant interest that makes good on the claims of the discrepancy hypothesis. 11. ...
... Studies with infants show a similar relationship. The discrepancy hypothesis ( McCall and McGhee, 1977 ) suggests that in infants, the level of unfamiliarity or discrepancy is correlated with attention in this way. The Goldilocks effect found that infants were significantly more likely to look away from highly familiar or highly unfamiliar stimuli ( Kidd et al., 2010 ). ...
... AR/VR technologies might also challenge player's cognitive resources by immersing them in experiences in which details of a game's environment that could normally be ignored might draw specific attention (that should be otherwise allocated for solving in-game goals), for example, the textures of a pathway that a player is traversing or background conversations between other players (which might or might not be relevant for achieving in-game goals). Such orientation effects could be explained through the moderate discrepancy hypothesis, in which we are inclined to attend to and understand stimuli that are familiar enough to have a basic comparison, but unique enough to draw attention (McCall & McGhee, 1977), but might be seen as disruptive from a cognitive demand perspective by overloading the player's already limited cognitive capacity to process the game environment. ...
... At one extreme, some models submit that affective/emotional processes function primarily to inform the person of his or her relation with the environment, and that there is no relation between affect/emotion and enacted behavior. James (1890), for instance, famously stated that emotions "terminate in the subject's own body," a position consistent with other researchers (Kagan, 1978;McCall & McGee, 1977). ...
We present a meta-analysis that investigated the relation between self-reported interpersonal attraction and enacted behavior. Our synthesis focused on (a) identifying the behaviors related to attraction; (b) evaluating the efficacy of models of the relation between attraction and behavior; (c) testing the impact of several moderators, including evaluative threat salience, cognitive appraisal salience, and the sex composition of the social interaction; and (d) investigating the degree of agreement between the meta-analytic findings and an ethnographic analysis. Using a multilevel modeling approach, an analysis of 309 effect sizes (N = 5,422) revealed a significant association (z = .20) between self-reported attraction and enacted behavior. Key findings include: (a) that the specific behaviors associated with attraction (e.g., eye contact, smiling, laughter, mimicry) are those behaviors research has linked to the development of trust/rapport; (b) direct behaviors (e.g., physical proximity, talking to), compared with indirect behaviors (e.g., eye contact, smiling, mimicry), were more strongly related to self-reported attraction; and (c) evaluative threat salience (e.g., fear of rejection) reduced the magnitude of the relation between direct behavior and affective attraction. Moreover, an ethnographic analysis revealed consistency between the behaviors identified by the meta-analysis and those behaviors identified by ethnographers as predictive of attraction. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of the relation between attraction and behavior, for the behavioral expressions of emotions, and for how attraction is measured and conceptualized.
... We hypothesize that the configural-changes were so unexpected that they attracted the TD infants' longer attention more than changing the shape of the eyes. This hypothesis fits with theories from the face-processing literature: it has been hypothesized that the more discrepant a stimulus is from the observer's state of knowledge (i.e., from their internal template of face stimuli), the more novel it is to the observer and the more likely it is to elicit a novelty preference (Dember and Earl, 1957;Berlyne, 1960;McCall and McGhee, 1977). In other words, if something is completely new and unknown, it attracts a relatively high level of attention. ...
Face processing is a crucial socio-cognitive ability. Is it acquired progressively or does it constitute an innately-specified, face-processing module? The latter would be supported if some individuals with seriously impaired intelligence nonetheless showed intact face- processing abilities. Some theorists claim that Williams syndrome (WS) provides such evidence since, despite IQs in the 50s, adolescents/adults with WS score in the normal range on standardized face-processing tests. Others argue that atypical neural and cognitive processes underlie WS face-processing proficiencies. But what about infants with WS? Do they start with typical face-processing abilities, with atypicality developing later, or are atypicalities already evident in infancy? We used an infant familiarization/novelty design and compared infants with WS to typically developing controls as well as to a group of infants with Down syndrome matched on both mental and chronological age. Participants were familiarized with a schematic face, after which they saw a novel face in which either the features (eye shape) were changed or just the configuration of the original features. Configural changes were processed successfully by controls, but not by infants with WS who were only sensitive to featural changes and who showed syndrome-specific profiles different from infants with the other neurodevelopmental disorder. Our findings indicate that theorists can no longer use the case of WS to support claims that evolution has endowed the human brain with an independent face-processing module.
... We hypothesize that the configural-changes were so unexpected that they attracted the TD infants' longer attention more than changing the shape of the eyes. This hypothesis fits with theories from the face-processing literature: it has been hypothesized that the more discrepant a stimulus is from the observer's state of knowledge (i.e., from their internal template of face stimuli), the more novel it is to the observer and the more likely it is to elicit a novelty preference (Dember and Earl, 1957;Berlyne, 1960;McCall and McGhee, 1977). In other words, if something is completely new and unknown, it attracts a relatively high level of attention. ...
Face processing is a crucial socio-cognitive ability. Is it acquired progressively or does it constitute an innately-specified, face-processing module? The latter would be supported if some individuals with seriously impaired intelligence nonetheless showed intact face-processing abilities. Some theorists claim that Williams syndrome (WS) provides such evidence since, despite IQs in the 50s, adolescents/adults with WS score in the normal range on standardized face-processing tests. Others argue that atypical neural and cognitive processes underlie WS face-processing proficiencies. But what about infants with WS? Do they start with typical face-processing abilities, with atypicality developing later, or are atypicalities already evident in infancy? We used an infant familiarization/novelty design and compared infants with WS to typically developing controls as well as to a group of infants with Down syndrome matched on both mental and chronological age. Participants were familiarized with a schematic face, after which they saw a novel face in which either the features (eye shape) were changed or just the configuration of the original features. Configural changes were processed successfully by controls, but not by infants with WS who were only sensitive to featural changes and who showed syndrome-specific profiles different from infants with the other neurodevelopmental disorder. Our findings indicate that theorists can no longer use the case of WS to support claims that evolution has endowed the human brain with an independent face-processing module.
... The second set of hypotheses draws upon a potential association between activity monitoring and the ability to understand various aspects of the scene under consideration. According to the moderate discrepancy hypothesis (McCall and McGhee, 1977) children will attend to those aspects of the environment that are only slightly outside their ability to comprehend, i.e. a child will preferentially attend to stimuli which are neither too simple, given his or her capabilities, nor too complex. The decreased attention to activities exhibited by toddlers with ASD with greater cognitive deficits and the similarity of these associations with toddlers with DD suggests that the salience of the shared activity might indeed be affected by the ability of the individuals with ASD to comprehend the significance of this type of interaction. ...
Background: Monitoring the activities of others is an early-developing skill crucial for learning by observation. Previous work in our lab has shown that toddlers with ASD monitor the activities of others to a lesser extent than chronologically age-matched typically-developing (TD) toddlers. However, the nature of this limited attention towards activities in terms of social and cognitive factors, as well as the relationship of activity monitoring to social dynamics more generally, are not fully understood.
Objectives: In this study we link atypical activity monitoring with social and cognitive deficits in toddlers with ASD and, by comparison with a cognitively matched group of children with developmental delays (DD), show that the results are not completely described by cognitive deficits. We further examine dynamic changes in scanning patterns in response to the ongoing social exchange in order to clarify the nature of limited attention to activities.
Methods: Subjects were toddlers with ASD (N=28, M=20.7 months), other developmental delays (DD) (N=16, M=19.3 months), and typical development (TD) (N=34, M=19.6 months). Participants were presented with a 30s video of an adult-child play interaction which centered on the assembly of a puzzle. Eye-tracking was used to measure attention towards activities (the area of shared focus of people in the scene), people, and the background (room elements as well as scattered toys).
Results: ASD toddlers monitored activities (M=35.5%, SD=21.8%) less than both DD (M=50.5%, SD=24.7%) and TD controls (M=54.6%, SD=13.8%), F(2,77)=7.8, p< .01, diverting their attention towards the background (ASD: M=29.8%, SD=20.9%; DD: M=17.2%, SD=10.6%; TD: M=16.7%, SD=9.6%; F(2,77)=6.9, p<.01). No differences in looking at people were found. In ASD, more activity monitoring was associated with less severe social impairment (r=-.39, p<.05) and higher verbal (r=.56, p<.01) and nonverbal (r=.63, p<.001) functioning. A temporal analysis examining attention to the scene in three consecutive temporal sections found that DD and TD toddlers modulated attention towards activities in response to changing scene content (p<.05, p<.01 respectively), whereas ASD toddlers did not (p=.93). A measure of the responsiveness of ASD toddlers to these dynamics correlated with social deficits independent of both verbal and nonverbal cognitive functioning (r=-.44, p<.05).
Conclusions: Infants with ASD show less attention towards the activities of others, limiting their ability to learn about and participate in typical social play. In addition, both TD and DD toddlers respond to the subtle evolution of the social exchange by modulating their attention to scene components, whereas ASD toddlers did not. These results suggest that, from an early age, children with ASD visually explore the social activities of others in an atypical fashion, and that the extent of these atypicalities may either reflect or contribute to the emergence of autism-specific psychopathology. Furthermore, limited attention towards the activities of others in ASD may be linked to decreased exploration induced by limited response to the social dynamics of the interactions of others.
... The second set of hypotheses draws upon a potential association between activity monitoring and the ability to understand various aspects of the scene under consideration. According to the moderate discrepancy hypothesis (McCall and McGhee, 1977) children will attend to those aspects of the environment that are only slightly outside their ability to comprehend, i.e. a child will preferentially attend to stimuli which are neither too simple, given his or her capabilities, nor too complex. The decreased attention to activities exhibited by toddlers with ASD with greater cognitive deficits and the similarity of these associations with toddlers with DD suggests that the salience of the shared activity might indeed be affected by the ability of the individuals with ASD to comprehend the significance of this type of interaction. ...
Background: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often exhibit difficulties in monitoring the activities of others and attending to contextually relevant aspects of scenes. Proficiency in these abilities in typically developing (TD) toddlers not only reflects advancing expertise in core social skills, such as joint attention, but is also likely to impact future cognitive and social development. Understanding the developmental progression of atypical monitoring in ASD is critical for the design of early diagnostic instruments and targeted intervention.
Objectives: This study examines, through eye-tracking, the differences between the visual scanning patterns of toddlers diagnosed with ASD (age: M=21 (SD=3) months; gender: 22M, 4F; N=26) and typically-developing controls (age: 20(3) months; gender: 20M, 6F; N=26) as they watched a video of a child-adult play interaction.
Methods: Subjects were presented with a 30 second video in which a female adult was directing a male child in the assembly of a child’s puzzle toy. The scene took place in a typical office with other toys strewn about the floor. The subjects’ viewing patterns were tracked and the time spent examining each of the following areas was recorded: 1) activity area (area of joint focus of the adult and the child, including the puzzle); 2) actors (the adult and the child); 3) toys (not including the puzzle activity); and 4) background (furniture, carpet, etc.). The proportion of time spent looking at these regions was analyzed with a MANOVA with diagnosis (ASD or TD) as a factor.
Results: ASD toddlers monitored the activity area significantly less than TD toddlers (ASD: .43(.2); TD: .56(.15); F(1,50)=6.6, p<.05) and attended more to the other toys in the scene (ASD: .12(.09); TD: .07(.05); F(1,50)=8.0, p<.01). No differences were found between ASD and TD toddlers in the proportion of time spent examining the actors or background features. However, in ASD toddlers, nonverbal cognitive scores on the Mullen Scales was positively correlated with activity monitoring (r =.44, p<.05) and negatively correlated with attention to the background (r=-.44, p<.05). Attention to the actors was negatively correlated with socialization scores (r=-.53, p<.01), social-communicative impairment (r=-.42, p<.05), and repetitive behavior/restricted interests (r=-.60, p<.01) on the ADOS.
Conclusions: Toddlers with ASD monitor the activities of others in an atypical fashion, attending less to the area of joint focus and shared activity and more to background distracters such as toys. Patterns of abnormal viewing were associated with social and cognitive measures of functioning. These results suggest that, by 20 months, the pathogenic factors involved in ASD are affecting the ability of ASD toddlers to attend to socially relevant areas of scenes. It is likely that, as the ASD toddlers grow older, the cumulative effects of this atypical monitoring will further impair their imitative learning and their ability to acquire knowledge regarding the rules of social interaction and play.
... (See Bogart2 et al., 1997, for more on this.) The notion that preference for familiarity or novelty may be a reflection of the amount of information previously assimilated was suggested by McCall (McCall, 1971;McCall & McGhee, 1977). Rose et al. (1982) suggest that familiarity preference occurs in an early phase of processing, and novelty preference reflects a later phase. ...
An Event Set x Event Set design used the occluded stick, solid stick, and divided stick stimulus events from Experiment 1 by Kellman and Spelke (1983). The design was analyzed using five different psychological models of the additive components of infant looking time in the nine cells of the design. Application of linear regression analysis to the data revealed that four of the models fit well. The best fitting model was shown to have two possible psychological interpretations. In one interpretation the infants represent the occluded stick as a solid stick but in the other the infants look longer in response to changes involving the divided stick. The fit of this model was greatly improved by assuming that some of the infants prefer looking at the novel stimulus but others prefer looking at the familiar stimulus. The implications of familiarity preference for the conduct and interpretation of other research are discussed.
Previous research on health information seeking has primarily focused on individuals’ intentions to seek or avoid information. However, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the actual behavioral patterns of information-seeking and non-seeking. To address this, we conducted a survey experiment manipulating cognitive load with mostly Belgian participants ( N = 359). By integrating self-report and behavioral data, we investigated motivations and conditions associated with information (non)-seeking behaviors on a healthy diet. Guided by the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model, we examined the roles of informational subjective norms and information insufficiency, as well as the moderating role of cognitive capacity. Neither informational subjective norms nor information insufficiency significantly correlated with information-seeking behaviors. However, a significant interaction between the predictors and cognitive capacity in predicting non-seeking behaviors was observed. These findings underscore the intricate nature of individuals’ behavioral patterns in seeking or not seeking information about healthy eating.
This chapter explores what psychology and psychiatry, including psychoanalysis, tells us about the experience of boredom and boredom’s antithesis—the experience of “interest-entertainment.” In addition, this chapter permits the assessing points of convergence/divergence of knowledge claims about boredom deriving from the perspectives of psychology and psychiatry (including psychoanalysis) relative to knowledge claims emanating from the review, in the previous chapter, of contributions emanating from Western literature and philosophy. For a variety of reasons, the task of assessing what psychology and psychiatry have to say about boredom/interest is neither easy nor straightforward.
Character liking, identification, and parasocial interaction/relationships are terms used in various literatures to describe character engagement. The current paper synthesizes more than six decades of research in media psychology and communication science to organize and delineate four processes related to character engagement with fictional characters: Attention, Appraisal, Affiliation, and Assessment. In addition to defining and distinguishing these four processes, we describe how they are influenced by narrative, character, and viewer features, leading to moral adjustment – that is, a viewer’s own morality being shaped and molded through exposure to fictional personae. We endeavor here to diminish conceptual confusion and to clarify causal, temporal, and reciprocal relationships between the four factors regarding moral adjustment in viewers. By uniting these processes under a single conceptual model, we provide a framework for understanding moral adjustment through character engagement that can serve as a launch point for more focused research projects.
We propose a framework for understanding epistemic curiosity as a metacognitive feeling state that is related to the individual's Region of Proximal Learning (RPL), an adaptive mental space where we feel we are on the verge of knowing or understanding. First, we review several historical views, contrasting the RPL perspective with alternative views of curiosity. Second, we detail the processes, conditions, and outcomes within the RPL framework which are proposed to be related to curiosity. Finally, we review several lines of evidence relevant to the relation between RPL and curiosity. These include (1) differences in the conditions under which experts and novices mind wander, (2) experiments investigating people’s choices of whether to study materials for which they have high versus low feelings of knowing, (3) results related to people's engagement with corrections to errors made with high confidence, and (4) curiosity, attention, and learning data related to the tip-of-the-tongue state.
The mutual regulation model (MRM) sees infant and caretaker as components of a larger dyadic regulatory system, where each person—infant and adult—influences and is being influenced by the communications of the other, in a circular, moment-by-moment, continuous manner. A co-created relationship emerges out of this ongoing co-creative and messy process of mutual exchange. The mutual regulatory process is seen as the formative process for relationships (Tronick, Psychoanal Dialogues 11: 187–194, 2001; Tronick, Psychoanal Inq 23: 473–491, 2003).
The study of humor development progressively increased through the decade of the 1970s. Evidence of the resurgence of interest in this long-neglected area of development may be found not only in the increasing number of journal articles devoted to it, but also in the recent reissueing of Wolfenstein’s (1954) psychoanalytically oriented Children’s Humor in 1978 and the publication of Children’s Riddling (McDowell, 1979), Humor: Its Origin and Development (McGhee, 1979), and Children’s Humour. (McGhee & Chapman, 1980). Most of this research has focused on the elementary school years, with studies of preschoolers being second most frequent. Surprisingly, very few studies have dealt with humor among adolescents, and those have rarely been developmental in nature. While college students remain the most frequently studied age group in this as well as other areas of research, these studies have also rarely been conceptualized to examine developmental change. While a number of studies have used subjects at various points in the postcollege adult years, the author knows of only one that investigated humor development among the elderly (Schaier & Cicirelli, 1976). Thus, while a decade or so of research has sharply increased our understanding of the development of humor up to about junior high school age, we remain completely ignorant of developmental changes from early adolescence through the years of advanced aging. The present chapter is designed to draw attention to this void and to begin to stimulate a life span approach to research on humor development.
Since 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) has included criteria for diagnosing depression in infants. These criteria are substantially the same as the criteria used to describe depression in adults. If the editions of the DSM reflect an accurate evolution in the nosology of psychopathology, the merging of diagnostic criteria in infants and adults may be construed to mean that depression in these two widely disparate age groups is now viewed as being fundamentally the same disorder.
Plaget's contribution to a theory of emotional development is discussed in this chapter. Although he has frequently been criticized for neglecting the emotional aspects of children's development, it can be demonstrated that Piaget has contributed substantially to a discussion of infants' and children's emotions. An extensive, descriptive presentation of Piaget's database of infants' emotions is provided here. Based on this descriptive account, a classification of the contexts in which infants' emotional expressions occur in Piaget's work is derived. It is shown how the theoretical language Piaget developed to refer to infants' cognitive development can be inferred based on this classification of their emotions. Furthermore, the implications of this presentation for a theory of emotional development are discussed, and issues such as the conceptualization of the origins and goals of emotional development and the ways in which “change” and the sequences and stages or organizations can be conceived in the emotional domain are addressed. Epiphenomenalism and parallelism are considered as two possible formulations of the relationship between cognitive and emotional development within a Piagetian perspective. Finally, based on some of the methodological and theoretical problems of Piaget's approach, suggestions are made for future theory and research of the interface between cognitive and emotional development.
This chapter deals with three broad issues: Whether emotions are epiphenomenal, how emotions play a crucial role in determining appraisal processes, and what the mechanisms are by which emotions may influence interpersonal behavior. We present evidence from studies indicating that emotions play a crucial role in the regulation of social behavior. Social regulation by emotion is particularly clear in a process we call social referencing—the active search by a person for emotional information from another person, and the subsequent use of that emotion to help appraise an uncertain situation. Social referencing has its roots in infancy, and we propose that it develops through a four-level sequence of capacities to process emotional information from facial expression. We discuss whether the social regulatory functions of emotion are innate or socially learned, whether feeling plays an important role in mediating the effects of emotional expressions of one person on the behavior of another, and whether stimulus context is important in accounting for differences in reaction to the same emotional information.
Given the observable fact that infants attend to and explore their environments, it is valuable to ascertain what variables determine these behaviors. In this chapter we turn our effort toward examining attention in infancy, in the belief that attentional processes play an important role in the child’s early cognitive development.
Two directions stand out in the current rethinking of development during infancy; one emphasizes the biologically given abilities and inclinations of the infant as a foundation for development, while the other stresses the infant’s social orientation and involvement from the earliest days of life. These two directions converge in studies of preverbal communication. The earliest communicative exchanges between infants and their adult partners are thought to rely on the sensitivity of both partners to certain aspects of human action, which seem to have biologically given significance. In the course of social exchanges, however, an infant’s developing understanding of reality is influenced by the meanings and interpretations given to actions and events by those interacting with the infant. Thus, the cultural understanding of the world soon begins to be reflected in various facets of infant activities.
Consider the following vignette:
Brian, an 8-month-old infant, crawled briskly into his family’s living room and stopped when he reached the middle of the floor. He paused to scan, with a sober expression, the faces of the unfamiliar adults surrounding him until he viewed his mother’s smiling demeanor, at which time he broke into an animated grin and an explosive cackle. During the next half hour, Brian played happily at his mother’s feet while adult conversation continued. On one occasion, his mother left the room briefly to prepare refreshments. When he later looked up to discover his mother missing, Brian’s happy play deteriorated into anguished sobs until his mother returned. It took a few additional minutes of comfort before he was ready to return to play again. At the end of the meeting, one of the adults stooped down to Brian and asked cheerily, “How ya doin’, big fella?” Brian looked up at him with a serious expression for a moment. Then he turned to his mother with loud sobs.
Many of the outstanding questions in the field of affective development may be put within a unified framework that can be described as an “organizational perspective” (Sroufe, in press; Sroufe & Mitchell, in press). For example, the question of age of onset of various emotions becomes subsumed under the objective of tracing the unfolding of various affect systems and their integration with cognitive and social development. The question is not whether the 3-week-old exhibits fear but rather what are the circumstances for eliciting negative reactions at this age and what is the developmental course of both the reactions and the changing conditions necessary and sufficient for eliciting them. How is earlier distress related to what might later be called wariness and later still fear (whatever terms are actually used)? What does the unfolding of the affect systems tell us about cognitive development, and how do maturational and cognitive changes impact upon the expression of affect?
A Perspective on the Nature of EmotionMultiple Component Processes and Emotional DevelopmentPhylogenetic Starting Points for Emotional DevelopmentPostnatal Ontogenetic Starting Points for Emotional DevelopmentThe Emergence of Social Smiling and Dyadic CoordinationIncreased Attention to the World of ObjectsFrom Impulsiveness to Wariness: The Emergence of FearFrom Dyad to Triad: Relating the Worlds of People and ObjectsConclusion
References
Infants' responses to child and adult strangers were investigated by examining the effects of height of stranger and facial configuration of stranger. Infants viewed child and adult strangers who appeared in windows which were either at child height or adult height. The infants responded positively to the height and facial configuration typically associated with children: child height and child facial configuration. The infants' facial expressions to the child stranger did not vary with the height of the window in which the child appeared. They looked more at the stranger in the child-height window and overted their gaze more from the stranger in the adult-height window regardless of whether the stronger was a child or an adult. The infants showed some indication of amusement at the discrepant height/facial configuration combinations. Implications of the results for theoretical explanations of infants' differential reactions to strangers are discussed.
80 male and 60 female infants were observed under 5 a priori judged levels of discrepancy to assess whether sustained attention was linearly or curvilinearly related to degree of discrepancy from an experimental standard. Following habituation, 7 1 2-month-old infants were exposed to either the repetition of the standard, a minimal, first- or second-level moderate discrepancy, or a novel stimulus having no relation to the standard. The related stimuli, varying in elongation, were sphere, pear, club, and cylinder-shaped objects; the novel stimulus was a different colored, tooth-like object. 80 infants observed the sphere as the standard and the cylinder as the second-level moderate discrepancy; 60 infants were exposed to the reverse order with the cylinder as the standard. The use of different stimuli at each discrepancy level controlled for specific stimulus effects. Habituation and recovery of responding were observed in an operant paradigm. Lever pressing, fixation, and vocalization increased most to the second-level moderate stimuli and decreased most to the familiar and novel objects; fretting was highest to the redundant stimuli and lowest to the moderate objects. There were no stimulus main effects or interactions. The results support the hypothesis of a curvilinear relation between stimulus discrepancy and sustained attention, excitement, and preference.
Reviews theory and research dealing with cognitive aspects of children's humor. Alternate means of defining cognitive mastery are discussed, and it is suggested that a Piagetian theoretical framework may offer the most promising approach to studying the relationship between cognitive mastery and the comprehension and appreciation of humor. Special attention is given to the operation of the cognitive congruency principle in children's humor. Suggestions for future theoretical and research efforts are made. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Utilizes the conceptual framework of C. Coomb's data theory to highlight similarities and differences between 2 representative but different discrepancy hypotheses: D. McClelland and R. Clark's hypothesis and W. Dember and R. Earl's (see record
1958-05022-001) complexity discrepancy theory. It is concluded that mapping of data into the models cannot be done unambiguously unless assumptions are made concerning as yet unspecified parameter values and properties of data. 2 different research strategies are discussed. A 2-stage strategy with simplifying assumptions is suggested as a possible approach toward quantitative specification of model parameter values. (32 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presented a familiar standard (S) and change stimuli (C) with varying amounts of discrepancy from the standard to 36 boys and 36 girls, 4 mo. of age. The pattern of habituation to the initial presentations of the standard predicted the response to discrepancies. Ss with very short 1st-fixation times during habituation showed differentially longer fixations and more smiling to the several presentations of the change relative to the familiar stimuli. Ss who rapidly habituated to the standard responded differentially to only the 1st presentation of a novel stimulus. These 2 groups also showed increasing fixation to increasing amounts of stimulus change in accordance with the discrepancy hypothesis. In contrast, Ss who did not habituate and displayed relatively long fixations to the initial presentations of the standard failed to respond differentially to the discrepant stimuli. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
As a follow-up to a study by R. B. McCall and J. Kagan (see record
1967-15027-001), 8 male and 8 female 31/2-mo-old infants and 10 male and 7 female 5-mo-old infants were given a pretest of their distribution of attention to 1 standard stimulus and 3 graded discrepancies from the standard. Then each mother presented the standard stimulus to her infant at home for 2 wks, kept a journal of the exposure time and the extent to which her infant looked at the standard stimulus, and returned to the laboratory with her infant for a posttest. The distribution of posttest minus pretest fixation time was a function of the age and sex of the S and possibly of the habituation pattern of the infant during home familiarization. For the older females, posttest minus pretest fixation time was an inverted- function of magnitude of discrepancy, while the curve was -shaped for younger females. The patterns for males were roughly opposite these trends. Ss who displayed habituation during home familiarization showed a positive posttest minus pretest response to discrepancies relative to the familiar stimulus, while Ss who did not habituate during home familiarization looked at moderate discrepancies less than at the familiar standard. The parents of rapid habituating Ss were more highly educated. (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presents a review of research which emphasizes the cognitive components of smiling and vocalizing and implies that these are reflections of basic characteristics of cognitive activity. It appears that the specification of the properties of smiling may help define and refine the process of recognitory assimilation, while the study of elicited vocalization may lead to an understanding of cognitive discrepancy. Smiling and vocalizing appear to reflect different features of the schemata formation process but unfortunately neither is well understood. It is considered that the relation between smiling to a nonsocial stimulus over age and the pattern of smiling to a repeated stimulus at any one age appear to reveal more information about an infant's cognitive status than the accepted practice of recording whether or not a smile occurs to a single stimulus presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the relationship between Ss' schema for a standard stimulus and responses to discrepancies from that standard, using 5 groups of 28 7-mo-olds (16 males, 12 females). Reinforced instrumental lever presses, fixation, vocalization, and fretting were major dependent measures in a habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Five papier-mache stimuli varied on a dimension of progressive elongation, and formed the basis for the no-change, minimal discrepancy, 2 levels of moderate discrepancy, and unrelated discrepancy groups. Mean changes in rate of instrumental lever pressing and duration of fixation at the transformation were highest in the 2nd-level moderate discrepancy group. Recovery of attention in the 1st min after change was a linear function of discrepancy, but showed a curvilinear relation in the 2nd and 3rd min. Results are interpreted in terms of L. B. Cohen's (1973) 2-process model of attention (i.e., an initial orientation reaction followed by sustained interest). Mean changes in vocalization and fretting were also a curvilinear function of discrepancy. The 2nd-level moderate discrepancy produced most increase in vocalization at stimulus change. Fretting occurred most to the no-change control and unrelated discrepancy groups and least to the moderate groups. The curvilinear function relating recovery of reinforced instrumental responses and of fixation to discrepancy was clearer for males than for females. Vocalization was a more sensitive measure of attentional recovery among females, and females smiled more than males. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presents an integrative perspective on cognitive-affective development which emphasizes the function of the infant's smile. The role of psychophysiological processes in the expression of positive affect is examined from the onset of the earliest endogenous smiles to the emergence of mature smiling and laughter. A tension-release hypothesis is formulated, which is complementary to social and cognitive theories of smiling and has the advantage of pointing to the function of the smile for the infant. The congruence of smiles following mastery and smiles following excitation is emphasized. Analysis of developmental changes in the "semantics" of the smile illustrates a number of descriptive developmental principles, including the following: (a) Developmental sequences may be repeated during the development of the same phenomenon. (b) With age, the infant becomes increasingly active in producing and mastering its own experiences. (c) Social and individual functions of early behavior often converge in promoting accommodation to and assimilation of novel events. (d) Fear and joy, wariness and smiling, have close functional relationships with respect to coping with novelty. (e) Cognitive and social-emotional aspects of development are inseparable. (55 ref)
Provides an overview of the studies which, during the past half century, have demonstrated that capacity for long-term memory increases during development in both animals and man. A variety of behavioral and neurological mechanisms are examined, which might account for the increase in memory during ontogenesis, in order to stimulate research on the relative contributions of these variables to the development of long-term memory. (101 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Replies to R. Elliott's recent critical review of J. I. Lacey and B. C. Lacey's position concerning the relationship of cardiovascular activity to behavior. It is claimed (a) that Elliott misinterprets the Laceys' psychophysiological and neurophysiological hypotheses, (b) that he has been selective and insufficiently critical in his citation of the research by other investigators, and (c) that the "alternative" position which he finds acceptable is not truly contradictory and is neither based on adequate data nor free from technical and conceptual difficulties. A response by R. Elliott follows (see PA, Vol 52:Issue 6). (56 ref)
In a series of observational studies, based on more than 150 infants in the first year of life, clear evidence of age changes in both amount of laughter and the nature of stimuli eliciting laughter was found. Those stimuli that were primarily tactile or auditory elicited laughter in younger infants and then became less potent in the third or fourth trimester of life, while most visual items and some social items became increasingly successful across the age range studied. The results were discussed in terms of cognitive growth, the psychoanalytic notion of ambivalence, the role of stimulus context in eliciting laughter or fear, and a possible adaptive, stimulus-maintaining function of laughter.
Reviews research studies of laughter in children, and presents a model describing eliciting conditions for laughter and related behavior. It is proposed that laughter occurs after conditions of heightened tension or arousal when at the same time there is a judgment that the situation is safe or inconsequential. The special case of laughter to discrepant or incongruous stimulation is described in detail. It is suggested that laughter serves the function of signaling to a caretaker that a given stimulus is within the child's tolerable limits of arousal. (51 ref.)
This chapter covers (1) the place of exploratory behavior in relation to psychological science, including historical background and a temporal scheme for articulating various subprocesses involved in exploratory behavior, (2) the theoretical concepts that underlie all existing theories concerning exploratory behavior, (3) methodology and findings with respect to the form of exploratory behavior that has been treated in most detail, namely that of visual investigation, and (4) the implications of the aforementioned topics for developmental psychology. It is concerned only with humans about 2 years of age or older rather than with infants and lower animals. Although exploratory behavior in general is discussed, the literature surveyed in the chapter pertains to visual investigation.
This paper reports 2 attempts to demonstrate the discrepancy hypothesis prediction that visual fixation time for human infants should be an inverted-U function of the magnitude of discrepancy between a new stimulus and a familiar standard. Moreover, the inverted-U curve should be less inflected when the discrepancies are accompanied by increases rather than decreases in stimulus information. The experimental design and method of analysis permitted the separation of effects for the familiar stimulus, the new stimulus, and the magnitude of discrepancy, and generalizations for the discrepancy effect across different specific stimulus pairs were possible. The data were in perfect accord with discrepancy hypothesis predictions. These findings were integrated with previous studies of discrepancy. While any single study may possess certain ambiguities, the authors contend that, despite large differences between studies in stimuli, procedure, and analysis, 25 independent groups of infants have displayed the inverted-U discrepancy curve-a convergence of results that make the discrepancy hypothesis a plausible notion.
Earlier studies of attention in infancy and of problem solving in young children provided support for a "discrepancy hypothesis," which proposes an inverted-U relationship between amount of discrepancy between existing cognitive structures and current stimulus input and amount of pleasure derived from the successful processing of that input. The present studies were designed in an effort to demonstrate a comparable relationship with respect to children's appreciation of humor. Children varying in the degree of (or length of time since) acquisition of conservation and class inclusion concepts were presented jokes in which the humor depicted derived from the violation of these 2 concepts. The results indicated that humor appreciation was greatest soon after the concepts were acquired, with reduced appreciation shown both by subjects who did not possess the concepts and by subjects who had mastered them several years previously. Support was claimed for the view than an optimal moderate amount of cognitive challenge is associated with maximal appreciation of humor.
Twenty pairs of normal children, age 15 to 36 months, were testedduring two experimental sessions to determine the effects of familiar and unfamiliar environments on their behavior. The variables measured were child-mother distance, child-child distance, and child-child dominance in the two environments. Results are discussed in terms of proximity to mother and dominance.
Five books on charts and graphs are reviewed from the standpoint of cognitive psychology. The review focuses on properties of the human visual information-processing system, and it considers how well the recommendations offered by each book work within the strengths and weaknesses of that system. The books reviewed are Semiology of Graphs, by J. Bertin (translated by W. J. Berg) (1983); Graphical Methods for Data Analysis, by J. M. Chambers, W. S. Cleveland, B. Kleiner, and P. A. Tukey (1983); Mapping Information, by H. T. Fisher (1982); Statistical Graphics, by C. F. Schmid (1983); and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by E. R. Tufte (1983).
The findings from 91 infants observed once, of which a 34-infant subsample was observed twice in bimonthly observations, generally indicated that: (a) to a large extent fear of strangers, fear of heights, and fears of the mechanical dog, jack-in-the-box, and loud noises develop independently; (b) the fear of masks shares some common variance with each of the foregoing fears; (c) there are no outstanding relationships between perceptual-cognitive ability as measured by specific fears; and (d) there are variations in temperament, and stable differences (over a 2-mo interval) in the pattern of fears displayed by individual infants, suggesting a possible genetic role in the development of fear during infancy. (63 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Suggests that habituation rate and pattern of looking during the familiarization phase of a visual stimulus discrepancy series provoke the hypothesis that infants who develop a memory engram of a stimulus are most likely to smile at a transformation or discrepancy of that stimulus. It is also suggested that infants characterized by rapid habituation and short fixations have different distributions of smiling to visual and auditory stimuli than long-lookers. Other data suggest that the occurrence of smiling and vocalization behaviors may (a) indicate that the infant possesses certain perceptual-cognitive predispositions which influence his response to new stimuli, (b) predict later mental behavior and indicate that there may be sex differences in the meaning of smiles and vocalizations; and (c) tend to supplement the previous hypothesis in emphasizing that perceptual-cognitive processes are likely to form the basis of certain smiling and vocalizing behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
From a sample of 18 normal full-term Negro females, findings indicate active regulation of visual input differentially related to the experimental stimuli; the observed discriminative visual behavior of infants in the 1st 2 mo. of life does not appear to be determined solely on the basis of stimulus properties but seems to reflect a more complex level of information processing, including associations from past experience with the stimulus object. (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
"Psychological complexity (characteristic of the event itself, the organism's response") is presented as a potentially unifying concept in the study of behavior. It is assumed to be isomorphic with neural process complexity, and distinguished from "stimulus complexity" (characteristic of the external stimulus and more or less independent of the individual organism). While obscure from a measurement viewpoint, such as drive and habit are, it is offered as a research strategy from which new insights into the traditional and well-worked area of learning are anticipated. Comments by E. R. Hilgard and F. A. Logan follow the paper. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
AN ATTEMPT TO ARRIVE AT A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF REINFORCEMENT BY STUDYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AROUSAL AND REINFORCEMENT. EFFECTS OF AROUSAL LEVEL AND THE INTERACTION OF AROUSAL LEVEL AND AROUSAL POTENTIAL ARE DISCUSSED USING FINDINGS FROM HUMAN AND ANIMAL, VERBAL LEARNING, AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDIES. PSYCHOPHYSICAL, ECOLOGICAL, AND COLLATIVE STIMULUS PROPERTIES ARE FOUND TO "AFFECT REWARD VALUE AND, MORE GENERALLY, REINFORCEMENT VALUE IN SIMILAR WAYS." AROUSAL REDUCTION IS REJECTED AS NECESSARY FOR PRODUCING REINFORCEMENT. (322 REF.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The topics that are to be treated in this book were unduly neglected by psychology for many years but are now beginning to come to the fore. My own researches into attention and exploratory behavior began in 1947, and at about the same time several other psychologists became independently impressed with the importance of these matters and started to study them experimentally. It is interesting that those were also the years when information theory was making its appearance and when the reticular formation of the brain stem was first attracting the notice of neurophysiologists. During the last ten years, the tempo of research into exploratory behavior and related phenomena has been steadily quickening. The book is prompted by the feeling that it is now time to pause and take stock: to review relevant data contributed by several different specialties, to consider what conclusions, whether firm or tentative, are justified at the present juncture, and to clarify what remains to be done. The primary aim of the book is, in fact, to raise problems. The book is intended as a contribution to behavior theory, i.e., to psychology conceived as a branch of science with the circumscribed objective of explaining and predicting behavior. But interest in attention and exploratory behavior and in other topics indissociably bound up with them, such as art, humor and thinking, has by no means been confined to professional psychologists. The book has two features that would have surprised me when I first set out to plan it. One is that it ends up sketching a highly modified form of drive-reduction theory. Drive-reduction theory has appeared more and more to be full of shortcomings, even for the phenomena that it was originally designed to handle. The second surprising feature is the prominence of neurophysiology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
• This work, a second edition of which has very kindly been requested, was followed by La Construction du réel chez l'enfant and was to have been completed by a study of the genesis of imitation in the child. The latter piece of research, whose publication we have postponed because it is so closely connected with the analysis of play and representational symbolism, appeared in 1945, inserted in a third work, La formation du symbole chez l'enfant. Together these three works form one entity dedicated to the beginnings of intelligence, that is to say, to the various manifestations of sensorimotor intelligence and to the most elementary forms of expression. The theses developed in this volume, which concern in particular the formation of the sensorimotor schemata and the mechanism of mental assimilation, have given rise to much discussion which pleases us and prompts us to thank both our opponents and our sympathizers for their kind interest in our work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Measures of 3-month-old infants' visual fixation of each of a pair of stimuli were obtained before and after a “familiarization period” in which one of the pair was presented without the other.Under all conditions, time spent looking at the familiarized stimulus showed a downward trend during the familiarization period. No further significant results were obtained when an initially nonpreferred stimulus was familiarized.Under conditions in which the initially preferred stimulus was familiarized, it was looked at significantly less after familiarization. When stimuli differed only in form or in color, familiarization did not affect subsequent looking time for the nonfamiliarized stimulus. However, when both color and form differed, the nonfamiliarized stimulus elicited increased looking time postfamiliarization.The results indicate that 3-month-old infants can discriminate circles from crosses. Since evidence of this discrimination does not appear in spontaneous visual preference, the procedure used in this study may have methodological value.
An 8-note standard tonal sequence was presented 8 times to 48 girls 5 months of age. Following this familiarization phase, a series of small or large discrepancies from that standard were presented. Attention in terms of cardiac deceleration to the discrepancies was greater if infants habituated during the familiarization phase than if they did not, and attention was greater if the discrepancy was large than if it was small in magnitude. The response to auditory stimuli could also be predicted by the looking pattern displayed by subjects to a set of visual stimuli given prior to the auditory episode.
6., umgearb. Aufl. Bd. 1. 1908. 15, 725 s. -- Bd. 2. 1910. 8, 782 s. -- Bd. 3. 1911. 11, 810 s.
The gratification which children derive from cognitive mastery on problem-solving tasks was examined as a function of task difficulty. Fifth and sixth graders were given a series of anagrams varying in difficulty. Greater pleasure, as reflected both in smiling and rated enjoyment, was manifest on the correct, compared to the incorrect, items. Among those correctly solved anagrams only, there was a positive linear relationship between smiling and difficulty level. Repetition of correctly solved anagrams produced a decline in smiling. Verbal data also supported the interpretation that the maximum gratification is derived from the active solution of challenging problems, whereas easily solved problems provide relatively little pleasure. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the concept of effectance motivation.
Thirty-six newborn human infants were repeatedly exposed to one of two visual stimuli, a four-square or 144-square black and white checkerboard target, until a set criterion of habituation was demonstrated, as measured by a decrement in visual fixation time. When the habituation criterion was reached, independent groups of Ss were either presented with the same target or with a target of either moderate or large discrepancy from the standard habituation stimulus. Results indicated that (1) there was habituation of visual attention, which replicated previous findings, and suggests that some infants soon after birth are capable of storing simple visual information, and (2) following habituation female infants displayed greater recovery of attention than male infants when the moderate stimulus change was introduced.
This study concerns the onset and early development of wariness in human infants. Thirty-two male and female infants were repeatedly observed, over the age period 3-9 months, as they responded to (a) the near approach of a strange person and (b) a variety of unfamiliar objects; their reactions were video recorded to permit repeated codings at various levels of analysis. The data suggest positing a hierarchy of aversive reactions, beginning with the distress reactions of early infancy, then a wariness of the unfamiliar, and, finally, acquired fears. Distress reactions were reported present from the first weeks of life; signs of wariness toward the stranger began to appear occasionally within the fourth month and became frequent in the second half of the first year. By 9 months there was indirect evidence of acquired fears in some infants. Infants who were particularly prone to distress during the first postnatal months were the first to show signs of wariness toward the stranger and, in general, remained more wary than other babies as they grew older. In the second half-year the conditions in which a stranger was encountered, as well as various aspects of an infant's interpersonal history, began to affect the quality of a baby's response. The novel objects promoted exploratory interest at all ages; only at 9 months were some unequivocal signs of wariness also in evidence. Detailed consideration is given to the parameters affecting reactions to the unfamiliar, including the temperament of the infant, the qualities of the unfamiliar stimulus, the nature of the encounter situation, and the baby's age and experiential history. It is suggested that reactions to an unfamiliar event often reflect the momentary balance between conflicting orientations: on the one hand wariness or fear, on the other a tendency to engage in an affiliative social relationship or in the exploration of a new object.
A simple visual stimulus was repeatedly presented to 120 infants 12 and 18 weeks of age until visual fixation reached a habituation criterion. A discrepant stimulus followed that varied in its magnitude of discrepancy from the familiar standard. In contrast to the age effects observed for the rate of habituation (though they interacted with specific stimuli), there were no age differences in the distribution of fixation times to the several magnitudes of discrepancy. Infants who habituated rapidly displayed an inverted-U curve of fixation as a function of discrepancy in accord with the discrepancy hypothesis, whereas slow habituators gave their maximum response to the largest discrepancy.