The effect of stimulus complexity on infant visual attention and habituation

Infant visual attention and habituation were examined with a procedure providing independent assessment of an infant's latency of orienting to a pattern (attention getting) and his subsequent fixation of that pattern (attention holding). 18 male and 18 female, 17-week-old infants were given 2 trials with a red circle, 16 trials with either a 2 times 2, 8 times 8, or 24 times 24 checkerboard pattern, then 2 more red-circle trials. The major results were that habituation occurred in fixation time with males habituating more than females, and that a general decrease occurred in latency with females selectively increasing or decreasing their latency depending upon the pattern they had previously seen. These results indicated the necessity of separating attention-getting from attention-holding measures and that both sexes remembered something about the visual patterns but demonstrated that memory differently.