Habit2: A stand-alone software solution for presenting stimuli and recording infant looking times in order to study infant development

Behav Res Methods. 2019 Oct;51(5):1943-1952. doi: 10.3758/s13428-019-01244-y.

Abstract

Many aspects of infant development are assessed using infant looking times to visual and audiovisual stimuli. In this article, we describe a stand-alone software package that allows simultaneous stimulus presentation to infants and recording of their looking times via a keypress by a human observer. The software was developed to run both on 64-bit Intel-based Macs running Mac OS/X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later and on 64-bit Windows 7 and 10. It can present a variety of visual and/or auditory stimuli; is customizable with respect to how trials are initiated, how trial lengths are defined, and the phases of the experiment; and can be used to record looking times online or after the fact, as well as to assess the reliability of coding. The software is freely available at http://habit.ucdavis.edu.

Keywords: Habituation; Infant looking; Software.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Child Development
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software*