Infant psychometric functions for detection: mechanisms of immature sensitivity

Abstract

Psychometric functions are described for individual 6- to 9-month-old infants and for individual adults for auditory detection of repeated, long- and short-duration tone bursts in quiet and for single, long-duration tone bursts in quiet and in noise. In general, infant psychometric functions have reduced upper asymptotes, shallower slopes, and poorer thresholds than adult psychometric functions. Infant-adult differences in slope and threshold are greater for short-duration tones than for other stimuli. Infant upper asymptotes are around 0.85 correct for all stimuli. One explantation for these findings is that infants are inattentive a certain proportion of time during the detection task. This model cannot account for the very shallow short-duration stimulus slope, nor can it account for infant-adult threshold differences for any stimulus. Other models of immature attention, or listening strategies, may be able to account for the slope and upper asymptote as well as the threshold of infant psychometric functions. Some combination of inattentiveness and primary neural immaturity may also account for the data. Although immaturities exist, some aspects of the detection process appear to be quantitatively similar in infants and adults.