Habituation and Cognitive Performance: Relationships Between Measures at Four Years of Age and Earlier Assessments

Abstract

Relationships between measures of visual habituation and performance on cognitive tasks at 51 months of age and between these and previous assessments (at 39, 27, 15 months and early infancy) were examined in 24 children. Results suggest that youngsters currently characterized as faster habituators, in terms of first fixation data, may be somewhat advanced cognitively compared to slower habituators. The indexing of a group of fast and of slow habituators, through median split of ranked first fixation ratios, proved effective in predicting performance across the four cognitive tasks at 51 months according to a discriminant analysis. Correlations between these ratios and both current and previous cognitive scores showed some stability of individual differences from 15 through 51 months.

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