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Course:
  - PSYC10211 Introduction to Developmental Psychology
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Infants learn an enormous amount in a very short space of time – a remarkable achievement enabled by a variety of learning mechanisms
### 1. Habituation & Dishabituation

A decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation reveals that learning has occurred
- The infant has a memory representation of the repeated, now-familiar stimulus
- The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect the general efficiency of the infant’s processing of information
- Some continuity has been found between these measures in infancy and general cognitive ability later in life
#### 1.1. looking experiment (Maurer & Maurer, 1985)

- 3-months old – pictures of faces
- At the 1st appearance of a photo of a face, her eyes widen and she stares intently
- With 3 more presentations of the same picture, her interest wanes and a yawn appears: habituation
- By its 5th appearance, other things are attracting the baby’s attention
- When a new face finally appears, her interest in something novel is evident: dishabituation

#### sucking experiment (Eimas, 1985)

- Allow infant to suck on a dummy that is connected to a computer and measure baseline sucking rate – Present phoneme (/pa/) repeatedly
- Sucking rate first increases and then infant habituates (i.e., returns to baseline sucking rate)
- Present new phoneme (/ba/) – Infant dishabituates (i.e. sucking rate increases)

### 2. Perceptual Learning



### 3. Statistical Learning
### 4. Classical Conditioning
### 5. Instrumental Conditioning

### 6. Observational Learning