Sensation and Perception 9th Edition by Bruce Goldstein

Exercise 5

In describing the habituation procedure, it was stated that when given a choice between a familiar stimulus and a novel one, an infant is more likely to look at the novel one. But in the Developmental Dimension of Chapter, we saw that young infants tend to look more at a mother's face than at a stranger's face. Why do you think this would occur if infants usually tend to prefer looking at novel objects?