ABSTRACT
In a traditional habituation experiment, the infant is repeatedly shown the same visual pattern for a fixed number of trials, and then one or more novel patterns are introduced. Most investigators in the area assume infant habituation implies infant memory. The separation of infant attention into two processes points out the danger of using total fixation time per trial as a measure of habituation. But, just because an infant decreases his response over trials does not necessarily mean he is habituating. The few existing models of infant habituation assume both that a schema, engram, or representation of the stimulus is being stored while the infant attends, and that some comparator mechanism determines whether the infant will continue to attend to the stimulus or turn away. Evidence from several sources indicates premature and retarded infants do not perform as well on recognition memory tasks as do full-term and normal infants.
