The Use of the Mother's Voice to Control Infant Attending Behavior

The previously reported demonstrations by Self and by Paden suggested that the addition of music could effectively rerecruit and influence visual attending behavior when no change in the visual stimulus occurred. Both of these demonstrations were shown within session. That is, the change of added auditory stimulation occurred during the same session that the baseline behavior was assessed. With the Paden subjects it was apparent that the baseline period might not have been sufficiently long to produce response decrement. Both studies used music as the auditory stimulus. Because of the authors especial interest in language stimuli and in the early listening experiences for young infants, two studies were executed that tried to determine whether voice stimuli are functionally equivalent to music stimuli in recovering and maintaining infant visual attention. In addition, it was decided to use an across-session design in which each infant would, over a series of laboratory sessions, be brought to a criterion level of response decrement prior to the introduction of the auditory stimulus change. The first study reported here involved the addition of a tape recording of the mother's voice, while the second study began with the mother's voice present and subtracted the voice at the criterion change point. These two studies were undertaken because of an interest in the voice