A rational information gathering account of infant habituation.

ABSTRACT: Gaze is one of the primary experimental measures for studying cognitive development, especially in preverbal infants. However, the field is only beginning to develop a principled explanatory framework for making sense of the various factors affecting gaze. We approach this issue by addressing infant gaze from first principles, using rational information gathering. In particular, we revisit the influential descriptive account of Hunter and Ames (1988), which posits a set of regularities argued to govern how gaze preference for a stimulus changes with experience and other factors. When the Hunter and Ames's (1988) model is reconsidered from the perspective of rational information gathering (as recently also proposed by other authors), one feature of the model emerges as surprising: that pref

SUBMITTER: Karni G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12646506 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature