Using Habituation of Looking Time to Assess Mental Processes in Infancy

Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization, object representation, and memory. This article describes the challenges for implementing this tool, and describes a set of best practices for its use to study perception and cognition in infancy.