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The Goldilocks Effect in Infant Auditory Attention #MMPMID24990627
Kidd C; Piantadosi ST; Aslin RN
Child Dev 2014[Sep]; 85 (5): 1795-804 PMID24990627show ga
Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity-limited cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. While we know infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input, few previous studies have directly examined infant auditory attention?and none have directly tested theorized mechanisms of attentional selection based on stimulus complexity. Using model-based behavioral methods that were recently developed to examine visual attention in infants (e.g., Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012), we demonstrate that 7- to 8-month-old infants selectively attend to non-social auditory stimuli that are intermediately predictable/complex with respect to their current implicit beliefs and expectations. Our results provide evidence of a broad principle of infant attention across modalities and suggest that sound-to-sound transitional statistics heavily influence the allocation of auditory attention in human infants.