Biomedical subjects

I U Swain

Publications and source records attributed to I U Swain.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1991

Newborns' head orientation toward trains of brief sounds.

Four experiments assessed the importance of stimulus number, repetition rate, and duration for newborns' head orientation toward brief sounds and related those parameters to the critical ones found for adults. Infants' responses to various trains of repeated 14-ms rattle sounds were compared with those to a 10-s rattle sound, known to elicit head orientation. Directional responses did not differ from the standard when rattle bursts were repeated at a rate of 20 per second for 1 s (experiment 1). Responding did differ from the standard and deteriorated to chance levels when either the number of moderately paced (6/s) stimulus bursts was decreased to six or fewer (experiments 2 and 3) or the duration of rapidly repeated (24/s) bursts was shortened to 500 ms (experiments 4A and 4B). These results suggest that newborns' head orientation depends, in part, upon the number of stimulus bursts and stimulus duration.

Adult↗

PubMed1989

Stimulus duration and repetition rate influence newborns' head orientation toward sound.

Three experiments evaluated the effects of stimulus duration and repetition rate on newborns' head orientation responses. In Experiment 1, 28 infants turned toward a 20-sec continuous rattle sound but not toward 14- and 500-msec rattle sounds. Signal energy as a possible explanation for the infants' difficulty orienting toward brief sounds was explored in Experiment 2. Twenty neonates did not turn toward a single 90 dB, 14-msec rattle sound, although a longer duration (10 sec) sound containing less energy (70 dB) did elicit reliable head orientation. In Experiment 3, 16 neonates heard trains of repeated 14-msec rattle sounds (2/sec, 1.3/sec, and 1/sec) lasting 10 sec as well as a 10-sec continuous rattle sound. They turned toward the most rapidly repeating brief sound and the continuous one, while the slowly repeating sounds elicited little head movement in any direction. These results suggest that newborns' head orientation is selectively deficient for brief sounds, that the difficulty does not result from lessened energy in the brief sounds, and that the efficacy of repeated brief sounds depends upon their repetition rates.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1988

Newborn response to auditory stimulus discrepancy.

Newborns were assessed for their recovery of head turning toward laterally presented auditory stimuli (titi) that varied from a familiar standard on 1 of 5 levels of fundamental frequency. Following habituation to repeated standard trials, newborns recovered to 14% and 21%, but not to 0%, 7%, or 28% discrepancies, indicating that recovery was a quadratic function of the degree of stimulus-schema discrepancy. Moreover, newborns reliably turned away from the standard stimulus during posthabituation no-change control trials, indicating that the neural network associated with that stimulus was not fatigued. Infants in every condition showed recovery of head turning to a novel posttest stimulus (papa). These data are interpreted with a dual processing model postulated to include both reflexive (context-independent) orientation and stimulus-schema comparison process (context-dependent) orientation.

Arousal↗