Amount of Short-Term Familiarization and the Response to Auditory Discrepancies

Abstract

McCALL, ROBERT B., and MELSON, WILLIAM H. Amount of Short-Term Familiarization and the Response to Auditory Discrepancies. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1970, 41, 861-869. Infant boys, 5% months of age, were given 4, 8, or 12 presentations of a standard 8-note tonal sequence prior to the introduction of a series of discrepancies formed by the sequential rearrangement of these same 8 notes. Cardiac deceleration to the discrepancies relative to the preceding standard stimuli increased as a function of the number of familiarization trials with the standard. This result was not simply due to increased habituation to the standard by the well-familiarized groups. In addition, there was an inverse relationship (-.70) between the magnitude of cardiac change elicited by visual and by auditory discrepancies such that infants who displayed large decelerations to visual stimuli responded only minimally to analogous auditory discrepancies and vice versa. This effect appeared to be directly linked to the discrepancies per se and was not simply a function of the arousal potential of the stimulus modality in general.