Physiological and behavioral parameters of infants' categorization: changes in heart rate and duration of examining...

This report investigates the relations between duration of examining and heart rate (HR) across several trials of an object-examination task. A total of N= 20 11-month-olds were familiarized with a sequence of 10 different exemplars from the same global category (animals or furniture) before they received an exemplar from the contrasting category at test. Consistent with previous findings, HR was lower during states of focused attention (i.e. examining) than during states of casual attention (i.e. looking) or non-looking. Over the familiarization trials, examining stayed about the same, while mean HR increased. At test, examining increased and mean HR decreased, indicating that infants focused their attention on the out-of-category object. Psychophysiological and behavioral measures of attention were systematically related over trials, suggesting that heart rate provides a suitable objective measure to study infants' categorization performance in object-examination tasks.